Overview

Gifto is a universal gifting protocol for content creators on social media platforms that enable them to receive virtual gifts or rewards from their fans. The Gifto protocol is an attempt to reduce the dependency to monetize content by individual content creators worldwide through conventional revenue sources that are primarily derived from advertising. Virtual gifts not only help content creators to drive up the revenue share but also helps to enhance relationship and interaction with fans and followers.

Problems

The evolution of social media mainly Youtube, Facebook, Instagram has allowed many talented individuals to share and upload content very easily and build a fan base. But in order to monetize or build a revenue source from the content shares, users have to heavily depend on advertisement revenue which are provided by the platforms or third party advertiser which are largely centralized. And often keeps with themselves a large chunk of revenue as commissions.

And, the existing incentive scheme is disproportionately biased towards those 1 percent content producers who commands a huge follower or subscriber base thus leaving the small content producers in limbo.

How Does Gifto Protocol Work

Gifto is built of Ethereum is a self-governing and self-sustaining ecosystem for virtual gifts that allows users to send/exchange virtual gifts across social media channels including Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Uplive. Furthermore, the Gifto protocol also provides analytics access to content creators to understand which type of content drives the users and get better monetization. The Gifto protocol consists of the following components:

Virtual smarts gifts: A self-executing virtual asset-based on smart contracts that is stored in the blockchain.
Gift Store: A place where fan can purchase virtual gifts for their favourite content producer
Gift Inventory: Holds gifts for a user who can either be a fan or a content creator
GIFTO Token: An ERC-20 standard based token used to buy and redeem virtual gifts
Gifto Wallet: To hold the GIFTO Tokens for users and contents creator
Gifto Portal: a management system of the virtual gift ecosystem, that is created, curated and managed by GIFTO Protocol contributors.

Key Participants in the Virtual Gifting ecosystem

Content Creator
Virtual Gift Creator
Curators
Fans

Here, the virtual gift creator is usually a visual artist who creates an image, animation as a virtual gift and gift creator cannot be the content creator as well. Curator plays an important role in maintaining the balance in the gifting ecosystem, and with strong curation framework that greatly increases the quality of content offerings. Curator checks on the content, category and pricing of the virtual gifts.

Incentive

Gifto protocol framework allows the content creator to keep the major part of the incentive as compared to the existing advertisement revenue model.

When a user purchases a GIFTO Token and sends it to a content creator, following incentive structure is followed so that everyone is compensated adequately in following structure.

Content Creators- 80%
Gift Creators- 5$
Curator: 2%
Gifto Protocol: 10%
Reward Pool: 3%

Key Features

Gifto protocol helps content creators to receive virtual gifts and rewards that helps in monetizing their content
Unlike traditional monetization structure which focuses on popular 1 percent content publisher, Gifto protocol provides a level playing field for even new and small content creators
The protocol allows, content creators to analyse the behavioural pattern of users to contents which allow them to make content accordingly which is not available in traditional systems.

Roadmap

Phase 1: Alpha version (Jan 2018): This version will be made available to Uplive content creators to use outside Uplive like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram.

Phase 2: Beta version (Q1, 2018): The Beta version of decentralized GIFTO protocol will be deployed on Blockchain that will be made available for external users outside Uplive

Phase 3: Commercial Version (Q3, 2018): Fully enabled ecosystem with commercial grade fast blockchain server that will enhance the reach of content creators worldwide.

Key Links

Website: https://gifto.io/

Whitepaper: https://gifto.io/GIFTO_Whitepaper_V2.0_20171204.pdf