After being rolled out for a few days on the test version of the website and where already a couple dozen Lions subscribed to premium, yesterday it was released to production and a proper announcement was made.
I didn't want to upgrade while it was on Labs, but now that it moved to the production website, I decided to do it as well.
First things first. I have enough years of experience with fremium (and premium) websites to understand how this works. At the same time, this is a social media website, and, apart from X, there is no such platform that I know of that has a subscription model.
On X, the system works by making it highly detrimental to not upgrade, if you are trying to use the platform fully and not for recreational purposes.
On InLeo, Khal wants to keep this an almost leveled field, with some additional perks for upgraded users.
InLeo Premium has just been rolled out, so it has no history behind to see how successful this approach will be.
X Blue is not that old either, and, like InLeo, they are still tweaking things over there too, as far as I heard.
What we know for sure is that social media is a numbers game. For a social media platform to become or stay relevant, it needs a large user base.
X has it and had it before they introduced X Blue. InLeo wants it.
Having a large user base and being the bold person that he is, Elon Musk probably doesn't really care if some users will leave because paying for X Blue is a must if you want results on X.
InLeo needs much more users, and numbers are not in the premium subscribers. That's why regular users must not feel disadvantaged for not being premium.
On the other side, InLeo doesn't get any revenue from Premium, X does. The funds from Premium subscriptions are used to buy LEO and HIVE and pool them together permanently on PancakeSwap, in the bLEO-bHIVE LP.
Provided there are no more issues with the bridge, that's something Hive needs, deeper liquidity entry and exit points to and from Hive.
Now, thinking from the subscribers to Premium point of view. What do they want? They can subscribe for different reasons, but among them we will find for sure one or more of the following:
- to sustain Leo and Hive
- for the Premium status and its perks
- earn back the cost of the subscription
- something else?
From my experience with fremium and premium websites and businesses, if users don't at least make back the cost of the subscription, after a while they drop out. Most people are very impatient, others will go on for a long time before they cut the expense. Since Premium on InLeo is not a recurrent transaction (for good reasons!), dropping out can be expected to be more frequent.
In most cases the HBD for Premium comes from Hive rewards. One has to wonder if one makes back that 10 HBD in a month or simply makes a contribution to the LP every month from the same rewards as before (more or less). The line with extra rewards is not easy to walk, due to our bad history with bidbots.
In Leo's case, Premium also has the connotation of contribution to Leo and Hive by permanently growing the bLEO-bHIVE LP on BSC.
There are at least 3 ways one can look at this, from this point of view:
- this will automatically grow the bLEO-bHIVE LP, and you would contribute to that by subscribing
- the smart contract buys LEO and HIVE with funds from subscriptions
- this isn't revenue for InLeo, so people may drop out and re-subscribe without the pressure that the project will suffer if they don't keep the subscription ongoing
To become more convincing, more perks need to be added over time, and the ones that have been added need to work properly. For example, are Lists working properly? I defined a list and can't add any members to it. I would also like more perks for the long-term content users.
So, where will I stand with my Premium subscription after the initial month? I don't know, to be honest. Based on my regular Hive rewards, this isn't cheap.
I really like this green theme though, lol:
Personally, I am and always was more excited for November 1st and beyond... Remember why? Yep, ad revenue distribution kicking in.
Want to check out my collection of posts? (work in progress!)
It's a good way to pick what interests you.