You can type the name “Tsu on FB timeline,” but the moment you write “Tsu.co” or post any link from the rival social networking website, you’ll be blocked. The reason is that tsu.co is the domain of the Tsu social network, a recently launched website that works exactly like Facebook, MySpace, hi5, and other social media sites, but with a twist. Unlike Facebook, Tsu promises to share advertising revenue with users. Tsu keeps only 10% of the ad revenue, while the user keeps 45%, and the chain of friends invited to Tsu split the rest. On the other hand, most social media sites, including Facebook keep 100% of the profit from the ads displayed on the user’s page. You get a financial incentive to post on Tsu, invite people to Tsu, and direct people to your Tsu page and even get incentive for sending people to the Tsu pages of the users who got you into the Tsu network. This launch strategy has paid dividends, and in its first six months, over 3.5 million people registered on Tsu, more than Twitter or Facebook ever got in the same period. According to Facebook, Tsu links are spam that are irritating the community, while Tsu thinks that Facebook is behaving like a bully trying to kill of the competition. “We’re persona non grata,” said Sebastian Sobczak, who founded Tsu. “You can type in all sorts of seedy websites, and you can get to them. But not us. We don’t exist.” However it definitely incentivizes scammy spammy comments with links. This means that your Facebook feed could easily be flooded with Tsu.co links and that is what happens when you give a Tsu.co link.
In order to boost their earnings including getting more friends, Tsu users are creating fake accounts. Facebook says that its users started reporting Tsu.co links as spam, which it defines as “sending bulk messages, excessively posting links … and sending friend requests to people you don’t know personally.” Facebook cut off Tsu.co entirely on September 25. With average of more than 2,534 visits a day, Tsu said it had been getting an appropriate amount of traffic from Facebook. But Tsu called upon Facebook when the visits dropped to zero and argued that it did not break Facebook’s terms of service, as it did not pay users to push content to Facebook. It did not work. However, Facebook said that they will unblock Tsu on one condition. Their users should not be able to post on Tsu and Facebook at the same time. “We do not allow developers to incentivize content sharing on our platform because it encourages spammy sharing,” said Melanie Ensign, a Facebook spokesperson. A dozen of Tsu users who are mainly models, photographers, and other artists drawn spoke to CNNMoney about what they had to say about Tsu’s more equitable pay-for-content program. While many of them have not made money yet, they felt that the block by Facebook is not justified. Claudia Everest, a 47-year-old cancer survivor residing in northern England started A Dog A Day by drawing 25 dogs every day and selling her work from home in order to pass her time during chemotherapy. However, Facebook angered her when the social networking giant deleted every post of her that mentioned Tsu.co. “Facebook either completely removed or labeled them as malicious content,” she said. “If you take a look at my cartoons I think you will agree that the idea that my work is malicious is laughable.” Carolina Franco, a 28-year-old Colombian model is of the view that Facebook’s strategy is an effort to keep its users from straying away to a competitor. “Very few people even know about Tsu,” she said. “I don’t believe that Facebook and Instagram want Tsu to go viral. It would cost them a lot of money.”
