From Social Betting to Collective Knowledge — Part 1: Why Your Opinion Matters
Your opinion, shaped by unique life experiences, is hugely valuable — even if you don’t know it. And we’ll help you start earning from it today on Bettery!
We’re creating a three-part series about the big Bettery vision to share why we started Bettery and how we believe it will fit into people’s lives that are almost entirely digital nowadays. In this first article, we’ll be talking about the purpose of Bettery’s existence and our beliefs that let us build Bettery — a space for everyone to create valuable collective knowledge out of each and every one of our own individual opinions, not just from a summary of them. In the second article, we’ll be talking about how the Bettery platform can make this collective knowledge creation possible through the comprehensive systems of Events, User Roles, and Reputations. The third and final article will be talking about Bettery’s tokenomic model which is designed to engage and incentivize users to take part in the cultivation of collective knowledge and empowers users to monetize this collective knowledge that they’ve cultivated. Now let’s get started!
The Value of Opinions in the Digital Age
In today’s digital age, a value can be created on the virtual network where voices and documentation can be exchanged instantly between individuals. Being at the same place and working together physically is no longer a necessity. Much of the daily tasks and activities we can think of today can be done online. We can work freelance jobs or remotely almost as effectively, sometimes even more so than coming to the office. We can learn school subjects and even many new, important skills via online classes and e-learning apps (except physical exercises but you can always play solo). And of course, we can connect with friends, family, and business prospects — and yes, even new ones! — anytime and anywhere we want without having to meet in person at all.
It’s just as simple as that. We can easily learn, practice, transmit, and combine our expertise and skills to create value all through the Internet and take part in the skills market where we can earn money in exchange for our labor. In fact, our world has become so digitized that there are now virtual bots performing both skilled and non-skilled tasks in place of actual human beings, utilizing information fed to them by other smart humans. When it comes to working in a physical environment with physical objects though, humans still need to be there as robots can’t really replace us entirely — yet anyways.
Bettery thinks BIG. We believe that every human out there, aside from their specialized skills and expertise as employees for major businesses or their own, has unique knowledge accumulated from numerous past and ongoing life experiences that can generate them value, aka help them earn. Such personal knowledge is gained simply from living life as a member of society — growing connections with other humans through common interests, creating and sharing experiences. As such, these aren’t knowledge that can simply be summarized in professional jargon on a CV — but they are no less valuable than one’s professional skills! Sadly, it’s not very easy to exchange them for direct value (read: sell them) — like for example, providing them to help a business make a consumer need-driven decision about their product — despite their worth.
And no, we’re not talking about giving your personal data and browsing history to major advertisers — often without your knowledge and consent, mind you — so they can flood your browser with hopefully relevant ads. And at most this is just your consumer “portrait” and doesn’t contain other important aspects like your actual opinions in the subjects and communities of your interest and how your life has shaped your perception of the world. The opinions and advice we give aren’t always based on the knowledge we have from the certificates and diplomas we studied and trained to possess. They’re also usually based on more personal knowledge we gained from just living our lives in this society.
Have you ever wondered if your opinion in certain subjects you know really well should be able to earn you money? Not like as your own business company or something but an individual paid service per piece of work. You might not have been a design or marketing major in college but you can definitely give an insightful opinion on which logotype or promotional design fits better with a given product, which selfie is better to post on Instagram for maximum likes, or which piece of text sounds more attractive and catchy to plaster on the main website, an ad, or even as the lyric for a sappy love song. You were most likely not a film or writing major in uni but there’s a high chance you’d be able to tell which joke works better as the ultimate punchline of that sitcom scene, or which piece of plot development would be more engaging for this genre of a movie at this point of the storyline. Some of these decisions can be very costly for a business today, typically made with the help of rather expensive experts and advisors that can cost as much as a mistaken decision.
“But wait, that’s just my personal opinion. I’m not an expert in those areas so I could be entirely wrong!”. Well, think about it this way. How much of today’s population of consumers have a degree in product UX? Yet consumers have been shaping the way products, services, and apps work since the rise of the concept “user-centric design” in 1986. The majority of us average users don’t have any marketing qualifications, yet most of us recognize a poorly done advert when we see one like these two major fail by Ford and Hershey below:
There are countless failed ad, marketing campaigns, and product development (including services and media) you can find on Google. Even political science “experts” are prone to being wrong. Remember so many of the winner predictions and projections made during the 2016 US Presidential election which all turned out to be totally wrong? Who’s to say who’s qualified to be an expert then? It seems that nowadays these “expert advisors” better be a large number of people of varied backgrounds and interests, just like how people are in the real world. This concept is known as collective knowledge.
The Way Your Opinion is Used and Monetized Currently Sucks
This model of collectively gathering information and knowledge isn’t new, however. Commercial survey platforms have long been relied on by businesses to collect and even analyze opinions and insights from users of any demographic. SurveyMonkey, Pollfish — stuff like that. So what’s wrong with these platforms? Let’s start with why survey platforms suck for users.
Imagine being on your average trip to Walmart. You’re most likely just vising the aisles that have what’s on your shopping list, right? Even if you’re browsing for a new brand to try out, it’ll most likely be in an aisle of a category of product you usually consume anyways — trying out a new arrival in the deli, switching up your green tea brands to see which one tastes more organic, etc. Now, if your flatmate calls and asks you to buy him a few boxes of his favorite eclairs brand that you have no clue about since you never eat baked sweets, you’d most likely be fine doing it for him right? (Hopefully, be nice!) It’ll also make your Walmart shopping experience more diverse, browsing aisles you never usually visit to learn about more things they offer.
However, if he asks you to drop by an artisan bakery a few streets from that Walmart to get him a box of his favorite eclairs — that’s a whole different story now, isn’t it? In that case, you might do it for him begrudgingly because you’re nice (and he already did you favor before too) but you’re very prone to making mistakes with your order (forgot to ask for extra toppings?) because you just don’t care that much as someone with no investment in his eclair-enjoying ordeal. Or you’ll just flat out reject him since it’s inconvenient for you and he never helped you before so you don’t want to do it. You don’t even like eclairs so it wouldn’t help you in any way to go off track to get to know a good eclair's place, and you don’t think he’ll compensate your good deed anyways.
In the first scenario, you’re rewarded with self-created incentives so you still want to do it and since it doesn’t take much effort and you like it, you’re much less likely to make mistakes. In the second, there are no incentives so you need to rationalize if you will get them or already received some in advance, but your focus is now shifted to incentives, not the activity itself, thus mistakes are more likely.
Doing a survey plays out similarly to doing an off-track favor in this Walmart shopping analogy. Most of the time, others ask you to help them with a survey so it’s a favor — whether for a friend or an inquiring business. Most of the time, the topic isn’t really something you’d have fun discussing with friends and like-minded people — not your main interest. So when you’re doing it, you’re most likely not that happy/willing to do it so you won’t take it very seriously, meaning you’re very likely to be skimming through the question and picking answers quickly or even randomly just to get it done with and receive a respondent’s incentive (read: reward).
In my previous company, we surveyed our users on their satisfaction with our product with a guaranteed reward for all respondents, and there was a question about one of our least used product features. With all the data at our hands, my team then already knew the feature has low conversion and high drop rate; yet all respondents report complete satisfaction with the feature. When we reached out to them independently with no incentives, the few of them that did spare their time to reply to us said they never bothered to try because they have no need for it, or said they tried and dropped because of XYZ issues.
But is this whole “doing survey to get money” thing worth it? Well not with the rate they’re paying you, that’s for sure. On average, SurveyMonkey pollsters get paid $0.35 per survey or so, while businesses using these services have to pay $9.85 per response to conduct a survey in Singapore or $1 per response in the US. That means survey platforms sell your opinion for 3–30 times higher than the amount they pay you — and you think you’re earning well from simply spending just a few minutes to give out your opinions! NOPE, absolutely not.
And Yeah, Businesses Ain’t Having It Better Than You Either
The troubles consumers have when taking surveys also directly translate to problems for businesses conducting them on survey platforms. Respondents not answering truthfully means inaccurate insights for businesses, which can lead to misunderstanding the market and making extremely costly wrong decisions. After all, what good is your initiative to understand consumers’ mindset if the opinions they give you are not really what they’re thinking? So a pretty significant reason for the high price survey platforms charge businesses is to ensure the quality of answers by filtering out unsuitable respondents and potential fraud.
Even if users answer these surveys truthfully, the other problem still stands: lack of interest means it’ll be harder to get respondents in the first place. This translates to higher marketing costs for businesses to get their survey out there. Since the vast majority of consumers don’t actively go to SurveyMonkey mobile app and look for surveys to do, promotional efforts are done on the biggest social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. — where the average person actually spends a lot of time on and reveal key personal information that can actually help businesses sort and choose to target by demographic. However, since Facebook’s algorithm has been changed significantly to favor content from friends and family instead of brands, businesses need to pay for “sponsored” posts which typically gets a lot of hate from users (yes, even the “right” demographic) for clogging up their timeline with invasive promotions. And if you’re wondering, yes it’s common marketing knowledge that the more specific/narrow your demographic is, the more you have to pay per user acquired. So yeah it can get really pricey to get actual users to see and answer a survey. And let’s not forget not everyone answers the whole thing through, drop rate is a pretty big concern for marketers!
Since demographic marketing can only be done on social media which are entirely separate from survey platforms, this chasm creates a huge opportunity cost for businesses. They can only grasp the surface-level portrait of users from these isolated pieces of information that puts them into that specific demographic. There’s little to no indication of the user’s life experience thus psychological portrait. So businesses only receive “what” is your opinion, barely “how” you came to have such opinions (aka your user persona), and NEVER “why” you provided that answer after all. Yet “why” is the heart of it all, the core reason for individuals and businesses to exist and live the way they do. This problem isn’t unique to survey platforms only. Even social media, arguably the most powerful digital tool to understand and reach out to consumers today, is still facing problems with upsetting and even losing users for flooding them with irrelevant, invasive, and even inappropriate content despite how much insight these platforms have into the users’ interests, preferences, or even life events and activities.
Honestly with all this in mind, you might actually even start to feel bad for these businesses (gasp). They’re pretty much getting ripped off by survey platforms, paying so much and getting back such quality for their money that can be better. It’s not like they’re charging a 0.2% extra “service fee” like banks do (which cryptocurrency fights to eliminate by the way). They’re selling digital information with a thousand percent margin at this point!
Another dilemma businesses face is also regarding the value of the reward. Make the survey reward-free and only the most diehard fans will touch it. Setting a low price means a low participation rate since users think the reward for their efforts is too low to even bother, while setting the reward too high will always attract people who’re only in it for the money and more likely to give untruthful answers.
But of course, as a middleman, survey platforms help businesses bring their survey to the most “suitable” respondents and obtain from them insightful answers back. These platforms give businesses a certain degree of protection from respondents cheating for the reward as well as analytics tools to better understand what the answers mean to businesses. Sadly, they still can’t solve the lack of genuine interest and thus efforts to give meaningful or at least truthful answers from consumers, as well as the reward setting dilemma. These are some of the key things Bettery is designed to change, and we’ll be talking more about that in the next article, so stay tuned!
