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February 23, 2015

Social networks make money from its users - but how could you start making money from social networks?

You could start making money from your status updates

Have you ever felt guilty for being on Facebook when you should be doing something more productive?

Well it might be time to stop feeling guilty, because there's about to be a way to make money from social media.

"Tsu" - a new social network which will work in a similar way to existing social media such as Facebook, Google+, or Twitter - promises to redirect profits BACK to the users. That's you.

Facebook earns its megabucks by charging advertisers to show adverts to its users.

But Tsu thinks that some of the profits in this business model should go back to the people who are actually generating the money - that, once again, is you.

So how would this actually work?

The new social network vows that 90% of its revenue will go back to users, so every time you write an update, share a photo, or visit a friend's profile, you could be earning some cash for yourself.

So that dream of sitting on your computer all day and making bank could be closer than you think... or could it?

My profile: I'm not yet making much money from Tsu...

How much could I ACTUALLY expect to earn?

Well it's quite easy to work that out.

The press pack released by Tsu shows some pretty optimistic figures for how much a user could expect to earn, with a figure of $23.3 per day.

That's not enough to buy that house in the south of France just yet, but it's still enough to pay for lunch and dinner every day.

It's worth pointing out that the above profile for John Smith doesn't actually exist on Tsu

But the big point here is that a new social network is coming along and wants tochallenge Facebook, and it wants to empower its users.

So if, in the best possible scenario, Tsu did eventually have the same success as Facebook in terms of recruiting new members (Facebook has over a billion users), you can use Facebook's revenue per user to work out how much Tsu users could make.

The average Facebook user is worth $1.95 (£1.21) of revenue to the company each month (based on data for the first three months of 2014).

So really, each user is worth around $0.50 (£0.31) per week. Obviously if Tsu had the same revenue-per-user it would only be giving 90% of that back to its users, to that's $0.45 (£0.28).

Can I live on £0.28 per week?

No.

But is that the point?

No. The point is that social networks are built on people, we use them probably a bit too much, and other people profit from that.

People are sailing on yachts and buying Tiffany jewelry because we open up an app on our phone to see what our friends are up to.

Tsu don't want to give each of us a yacht, or a shiny Tiffany ring, but it wants to at least give something back.

A statement on the website says:

"2 billion of you create social content and get nothing for it. It's your content, your audience and you should own it."

I signed up to Tsu and here's my profile - be my friend

The website's founder, Sebastian Sobczak, explains:

"The markets we participate in are enormous, growing and can materially compensate each user — we’re simply and uniquely rewarding the users who are doing all the work. This is the way the world should work.”