In general, Facebook is happy to have its users posts content. All those status updates, photos, and links to news articles, are more than welcome. That being said, Facebook doesn’t seem to like links to a website called Tsu (which is pronounced Sue). Facebook deleted more than 9.5 million posts that included links to Tsu. The reason why depends on which side you want to believe.
We all know what Facebook is. I used to have a Facebook account, but deleted it after realizing that the things I saw posted on Facebook made me angry. This could be due, in part, to some of my relatives that aren’t very tactful and who have a tendency to say mean things (even offline). Your experience may vary.
Tsu allows users to share photos, videos, and other content with their friends and followers, much like Facebook does. The difference between the two sites is that Tsu pays its users a percentage of ad revenue in the form of royalties generated by the content they posted. One cannot join Tsu until they obtain an invite (which is a short code that comes from a current user).
I’ve read quite a few news articles about the Facebook/Tsu situation. It seems to me that Facebook views Tsu as “unsafe”. Facebook prevents users from posting that content. According to NBC News, Facebook doesn’t let outside publishers pay users to post links on Facebook. More specifically, the problem, as Facebook sees it, is that Tsu pays users to post invite links onto other sites.
Tsu, on the other hand, appears to think that what is really going on is that Facebook doesn’t want its users to get the idea that the content they currently share on Facebook is worth getting paid for. Some feel that Tsu could become a competitor to Facebook.
I used to write for a website that paid users a small amount of the ad revenue that their content generated. It wasn’t Tsu. However, when the money dried up at the website I was writing for, some of the other writers switched over to Tsu. I’ve no idea how well they are doing because I didn’t follow them over.
What I do know is Tsu gives users a short code that they can share to invite new users to the website. It doesn’t actually pay users to post that code. Instead, it pays users for their content (based on ad revenues). Tsu takes 10% of the gross revenues. An individual user gets 50% of the revenue. The rest goes, in separate portions, to the user who invited that person, the one who invited that one, and so on up the chain.