

Ask HN: How many of you run Startup which shares revenue with their users? - techaddict009

I find very few Startups which share revenue with users.<p>By revenue sharing I mean part of revenue shared with the user who creates content and shares on the platform. Ex: Yotube.<p>Can you share your experience with the same if you run one.<p>How do you manage payments and taxes for users of different countries?
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CamTin
I think you've hit the problem square with your last question.

The answer to "how do I take payments from my users?" is easy and there are
several answers that you know off the top of your head (Stripe, Paypal,
Kickstarter in certain circumstances) which are probably also the right
answer. The answer to "how do I pay my users?" is much much harder. I don't
know the practical answer for right now.

For the future, though, I think the answer will be blockchain currencies
(think Bitcoin) and smart contract platform/currency hybrids (think Ethereum).
These will let the internet route around county tax offices, kafkaesque
licensing bureaus, and (probably, sadly) a lot of pro-worker labor legislation
as well.

You /could/ do this right now: allow users who accrue credit on your platform
to cash out either in USD (or your local currency, following your local laws
and regulations) or in BTC. The problem is that the "real currency" side of
things, even for one jurisdiction, will be a tremendous pain in the ass, and
then that there is no significant constituency of people who use (or want to),
or even understand blockchain technologies. It may also make your service come
off as "scammy" or arouse suspicion, even among cryptocurrency advocates,
since essentially anyone who holds the private keys to coin belonging to
others is under suspicion these days.

Ethereum, Counterparty, and ilk provide some answers to the trust issue, but
not a leakproof solution.

In short, I'm all ears too, and hope someone has a satisfying answer.

~~~
techaddict009
One of the way I found is to use Adsense Host Api. So google will pay on
behalf you. Sites like hubpages use this. But problem with Google Adsense Host
Api is you need to have atleast 100K Page Views a day to even be eligible for
the program. Secondly this can be used only when your Startup's revenue is
based on Ads.

