What went wrong for Tsū - any lessons to be learnt for steemit?

Somehow tsū totally passed me by when it was in existence.

It was a social network that rewarded content creators for their content. Tsū paid its members a share of its ad revenue for posting and sharing content.

Tsū was launched in October 2014 and with the attraction of the rewards it had a meteoric rise. It had 3.5 million members within 6 months of launch, and 4.5 million users at its first anniversary.

By comparison, it took Facebook 10 months to reach 1 million users, and Twitter 24 months.

Tsū also attracted celebrity users like 50 Cent and Timbaland.

The honeymoon period for the site was short lived. Facebook blocked links to the site in September 2015 citing complaints that tsū members were spamming to recruit members. The ban was lifted 3 months later after a widespread backlash.

The initial rapid growth rate of the site did not last. After peaking at 5 million users membership began to decline rapidly.

The site was shut down on 2 August 2016. Tsū’s founder Sebastian Sobczak stated at the time :

"We have permanently taken the tsu product offline due to the cost associated with running it and our inability to complete the last funding round..."

The Wikipedia entry says :

"The likely reason is that too many members joined to make money rather than for the social network, and membership declined swiftly when earnings did not live up to expectations.

TechCrunch had a somewhat harsher appraisal of the rise and fall of tsū :

"Tsu users, meanwhile, didn’t come because they cared about connecting – they came for the money. That never ends well."

TechCrunch, 16 August 2016 - Spammy social network Tsu shuts down

I came across tsu today after spotting a mention of it in the profile of @fitinfun. A quick search around suggests there are quite of number of tsu refugees here on steemit like @steevc and @haphazard-hstead.

I would be most interested to hear comments from former tsuvians about what they thought about the platform, why it went wrong, how it compared with steemit...

And most importantly - are there any lessons steemit should learn from tsū ?

Of course this is old news but I am very interested to know more about tsū - particularly as steemit is reaching the same point in its timeline as when tsū started on its downward slide.

Over to you former tsuvians.

If you found this post useful or interesting please do upvote, resteem and follow. Thank you.

You might also be interested in some of my other posts :

[graphic provided by @pennsif]