In the following video, a great recap of the history of YouTube is made that shows how YouTube gained dominance by rewarding content producers (a laudable accomplishment, no argument there) but, too, how it has started to stray from that vision. The story starts with the content creators (which is the same audience that Manna Network is speaking to). YouTube is about video content while Manna Network is about website generated content. Listen to just the 12:30 mark (a two minute listen total) and then keep reading. Afterwards, if you would like to add (or detract) from the narrative feel free to join a public discussion at the forum or use the contact form for more private discourse.
The starting point was YouTube offering to pay content producers back in 2006. But then a point is made that the offer to pay was under “the guise of getting people to start a business”. And right after that, it explains how YouTube is changing the rules and attempting to get rid of those that helped build their success.
The Manna Network is an ad network that enables website operators to invest their web traffic (just like early YouTubers got to invest their time and talent making videos) for long-term passive income and an ownership stake in the company their content builds. The Manna Network pools and aggregates their web traffic into a larger and more valuable block.
After our Manna Network users have invested their web traffic in the cooperative, our different compensation system starts to come into play. In exchange for each website operator’s investment of their web traffic, they receive an agency type relationship with the Manna Network enabling them to sell (for perpetual, lifelong commissions) the aggregate of the web traffic their investment helped build. They invested a relatively small amount of traffic but get to sell the quite large amount of traffic to their visitors and, since the aggregate is worth a lot more than just the small amount of traffic on their site and the advertiser (the buyer) is in a competitive bidding arrangement, they then get sizable (50%) commissions for as long a time as that advertiser keeps buying.
A website is different than a video, however, and has a unique connection to the customers that videos do not have. Everyone of the customers acquired through the content and efforts of our member websites has a website themselves! When someone buys advertising in the Manna Network, they are buying an ad that is basically a link to their website. That simple connection is hugely important because it means every customer may be even more valuable if they, too, join as a member than from what they buy as an advertiser! That is why we made the members of The Manna Network “agents” to sell our advertising for us. They not only can earn perpetual commissions for the web traffic their customers buy but they can also get additional income for bring that “lead” into our network as well. Since we know they have a website we try to also get them to become a member and, if they do, they add value through their web traffic investment (that profits everyone in the network) and also through their own sales efforts.
The high conversion rate of turning customers into members means members are key players in the growth of the Manna Network that help build it in many more ways than the video contributors to YouTube did. The Multi Level Compensation plan where they get paid override commissions for those that get recruited from their sales efforts effectively gives them a contractual interest in the portion of the company they helped build. But as we see in the YouTube experience, good intentions early on can be changed later by corporate greed. It was for that reason the Manna Network is organized as a Trust (and not a corporation) and as a co-op. Both those structures establish the members as beneficiaries and owners.