Pay-to-view gives popular Relica creators more chances to earn money

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Do you think you have visual content people would be willing to pay for? Bitcoin image app Relica has launched its “pay-to-view” feature, letting creators and influencers set a price for followers to view their uploads.

Pay-to-view is set at account level, meaning any images a user uploads without the feature activated are (and will remain) free for anyone to see. When activated, however, images will be invisible until the viewer pays the price the creator sets. That price can be set anywhere from US$0.01 to $100.

#Relica is excited to introduce Pay-to-View to its platform 🥳🎉

Pay-to-View allows content creators to create paywalls from $0.01-$100 per photo 🤑

Only on Bitcoin. It's time to reimagine social media ✨

📸🌎🌸 #Relica #BSV #Bitcoin #Paytoviewhttps://t.co/VZ7rfKSIMm

— Relica (@Relicaworld) June 7, 2021

On the surface, it’d look like the usual line-up of attractive (mostly female) social media celebrities who’d benefit from this. But Relica has suggested a number of other ways to earn from pay-per-view, such as art and music, giveaways and discount codes, daily workout suggestions, family recipes, “behind the scenes” exclusives, specialist training, gaming tips, as well as the usual design and photography. You could also use the feature to post a QR code linking to other content hosted elsewhere.

Speaking to CoinGeek, Relica co-founder Daniel Street said breaking into the mainstream influencers market is and was always one of the company’s main goals. It’s not surprising, since these are the users most likely to bring traffic to the platform. Pay-to-view is part of this strategy.

“We are currently focused on ensuring Relica is polished to a certain level and implementing a number of key features prior to targeting influencers through marketing campaigns. Currently, our main social channel is Twitter. We’ll be ramping up our marketing campaign with other social channels in the coming months as we also begin collaborating with influencers.”

Though similar in many ways to Instagram, Relica’s Bitcoin wallet integration and the instant/invisible payments that BSV allows are its killer feature. While there’s no way for Instagrammers to directly monetize the images they post there, some Relica users have already earned around US$30-40 in the short time the platform has been available—even without the pay-to-view feature.

Currently, Relica users earn around $0.02 per Like, $0.08 by getting a new follower, and $0.01 per comment. The most common and popular social media networks available today are simply unable to implement these features, as they’d need to rely on credit card payments, bundling them and paying fees to process.

Likewise, you couldn’t build Relica on BTC or even Ethereum, thanks to those networks’ inabilities to handle micropayments and large volumes of transactions. BSV has highlighted just how much BTC and ETH developers dropped the ball on making blockchains actually functional in real life, scooping up many of Bitcoin’s oldest ideas to turn into profitable businesses.

Street said Relica is looking into the ability to upload short videos as well as static images. Launching pay-to-view is top priority for now though, with Street adding that it “changes the playing field” by letting users set their own price depending on what their content is worth. After that, it’s up to their imagination how to use it to make more money.

Relica launched in November 2020, but was invite-only until it opened to all users in early 2021.