Our friends at Vimeo have built a high-quality platform for the creative community to promote their beautiful videos. Many in the Fluence community have requested that we accept native Vimeo support, because it’s their first choice in video playback given Vimeo’s refusal to pollute people’s attention with disruptive ads on their video. We are happy to announce the addition of native Vimeo video links into Fluence to help the creative community connect on their own terms.
One mesmerizing short film from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo has already caught the attention of Fluence curator and film expert Nic Baisley.
We’re happy to announce that we now accept payments in bitcoin at https://fluence.io.
What is bitcoin?
Born out of the near collapse of the world economy in 2008, bitcoin allows you to pay for stuff without going through those pesky banks. This is world-changing stuff as the current banking system is incredibly unfair. Banks borrow money from the government for virtually nothing (< 0.25%) and then rent it out to the rest of us for more than 50 times that much. Merchants who want to accept credit card payments are forced to handover almost 3% of the transaction + $0.30 on top. We’ve come to accept this as a necessary cost of doing business — there needs to be some centralized authority responsible for evaluating who can be trusted and settling the accounts right? Well — with the invention of bitcoin and its ever increasing adoption around the world, things no longer have to work this way.
Why is Fluence using it?
At Fluence, we’re excited about Bitcoin not just because of lower transaction fees, but because we see it as a kindred spirit to our own fledgling marketing technology. Fluence levels the playing field by allowing anyone to promote their work directly to the people who can help the most; those with an existing audience and demand for their attention who would otherwise probably ignore email sent to their overflowing inbox. These “oversubscribed” people set a price for their time and attention to review media submissions and provide helpful feedback and advice, as well as share on Twitter or Facebook when they come across stuff they genuinely enjoy. Fluence provides complete transparency about what happens when each user engages with your media. This is radically different from traditional PR or an advertising agency which charges much higher fees and often provides little insight into exactly what you’re getting for your money.
How do I pay for promotions using bitcoin?
You’ll need a Coinbase account to use bitcoin on Fluence. When you submit a media URL to Fluence (we currently support YouTube, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Kickstarter and Bandcamp links and will roll out support for any URL in the near future), you can choose who you’d like to send it to. You’ll be prompted to connect your Coinbase account when you go to pay for your order. Your account will be charged the latest BTC to USD conversion rate and if any of your targeted reviewers do not actually review your media within two weeks, you will be refunded in USD which will be converted into BTC and deposited back into your Coinbase account.
What’s next?
Today we’re allowing you to use your bitcoin wallet at Coinbase to fund your Fluence account but we still actually operate in USD. This is not ideal for many reasons. We run a global attention marketplace and having to exchange currencies between buyers and sellers in different countries can incur excessive transaction costs. Everyone would save money if we operated entirely in bitcoin within Fluence and just let people add or remove funds in their home currency if they felt the need to. One concern is that users would be subject to currency risk due to the fluctuating value of bitcoin, but it’s not just BTC that’s depreciated significantly in the past year. The recent volatility in global currency markets only reminds us more of the benefits we could reap by transacting purely in the bitcoin realm, incurring virtually zero transaction costs along the way.
We’re happy to announce that Fluence has expanded to accept music submitted from Bandcamp.
Bandcamp has directly paid artists over $100 million; a huge milestone and testament to the power of direct-to-fan services. As longtime builders and supporters of direct-to-fan services, we’re driven to empower artists and the creative community to connect in new, innovative ways.
Take a look at some of the amazing artists on Bandcamp already using Fluence to promote their music and forge new relationships.
We invite you to join Bandcamp if you haven’t already, and start getting feedback and exposure with $5 free credit to promote your Bandcamp tracks here on Fluence.
We designed a new dashboard for you to easily manage your submissions through Fluence. For submitters, you can now easily see the latest activity your submissions receive. View the auditions, detailed ROI stats, and social shares for each submission directly on the summaries in the Dashboard.
For curators, the new Dashboard is split into a Pending Auditions queue showing all the media sent directly to you, a History section listing all the submissions you’ve auditioned in the past, and a Recommended section presenting our best suggestions of submissions that may be of interest to you.
It’s early days for the Recommended section, but as Fluence grows, our suggestions for you will have a higher probability of being a good match. We use a combination of your social connections and a submissions popularity within your network to recommend matches.
