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This social network pays its users for their status updates

Bubblews enables its users to make money for sharing their thoughts online.

It’s widely considered that there’s an unwritten contract between tech companies and their userbase — you get to use our service for free, but we own the content you post and can sell it to third parties or use it to target advertising. However, the backlash over Instagram’s privacy policy changes in 2012 showed that consumers aren’t totally happy to give social networks free rein with their data. We’ve even seen services such as Datacoup enable web users to take control of their online information by choosing what to share and selling it to businesses. Now Bubblews is enabling its users to make money for sharing their thoughts online.

Much like other social networks, Bubblews is primarily a platform for posting short updates and following other people’s updates. It uses the information users share to modify what appears in their news feed — much like Facebook — but instead of keeping advertising money to itself, it pays users a tiny amount for each post they make. Users make more money when they post more frequently (although updates are limited to 10 per day), receive more stars and comments, and have a higher follower count. Given its current userbase size, it may take a while to earn any serious money, but when users have earned more than USD 50 for their content, they can withdraw the cash into their bank account via PayPal.

Challenging the throne of Facebook and Twitter is a difficult task for any new social network and the site is keen to show that it’s different from typical social networks — it’s updates are known as ‘bubbles’ and it uses the ampersand and plus characters in place of the more common @ and hashtag, respectively. However, issues of pervasive advertising and problems with bots have been raised by some. It’s also uncertain how Bubblews plan to monetize the format in the future. But will consumers be swayed by the benefit of being paid to use the service?