What is Rakugo and does it compare to Steemit?
Hello Steemians,
I very recently came across this new cryptocurrency ICO, "Rakugo Bounty", popping up on my facebook feed of all places. Actually, I get a lot of these ICO ads showing up there now. A half-hearted thank you to facebook's and google's ad algorithms for that I suppose.
KickICO, one of many ICOs' showing up in my Facebook feed these days
So what is Rakugo? Well, apparently it is a 'secure content publishing platform that rewards contributors with revenue and exposure for their content'.Sound familiar to anyone?
I quickly did some google searching and steemit searching, but there didn't seem to be much on this yet, other than your speculating forum chats etc. SO I figured while reading through the Rakugo website, whitepaper, etc, I would update everyone on here with my findings, and see if any further discussion or expert weigh-in comes of it.
Although on first glance Rakugo seems like a similar concept to Steemit, the first noticeable difference is that they are having an ICO, which Steem did not.Their ICO priced 'rakugo seed tokens' at 1200 per ETH, with a goal of 2000-20,000 sold. Their seed valuation is based loosely on the valuation on BuzzFeed, and on their growth projections, which are outlined below (and very ambitious..).
They have a very fancy diagram to illustrate the complexities of their platform's model, as shown below:
diagram illustrating Rakugos content community, bounty payment structure, and "Kenzo(??)
Rakugo proposes to provide a platform for content publcation, monetization, and furthermore... copyrighting. How does it do this? Through 'Kenzo', which is an integrated platform that creates a digital footprint of published content, stored on the blockchain. 'Rakugo' is actually the publishing platform, and rewards authors with exposure and revenue. Of note, Rakugo is built on the Etherium blockchain.
All of this info was contained on their Business Plan published on their website. It is actually quite in depth, even outlining their specific plans for growth, including the expectation of 0.20% market share in 2021.In their first year, they expect to reach 14 million monthly active users, and 31,000 monthly active content creators or authors. How does this compare to Steemit? Well, since launching in March 2016 (almost 1.5 years), Steemit has over 298,000 accounts (
Importantly, how do they plan to generate revenue? It was disappointing but not surprising to see that Rakugo will take in ad revenue to help pay content creators. In addition, it will take service fees from additional offered services such as custom branded publishing sites, mobiles apps. Content creators can also charge subscription fees, of which Rakugo will take a subscription processing fee.
Rakugo is also not the same as reddit, steemit, medium, other blogging/posting platforms in terms of the type of content they intend to publish. In addition to blog posts, they will publish guides, eBooks, images, and videos. Different publishing formats is perhaps something Steemit could one day expand to, or perhaps this is something that might differentiate steemit from Rakugo, the same way reddit serves a different function than publishing companies.
Info on Development and Management Team (ie, are they legit, or are they hobbyists?):
I didn't spend too much time analyzing the Rakugo team, but many of them do look quite experienced in blockchain and in business. Quoted text from the Rakugo Business plan:
"Rakugo’s team brings together the best technical and growth talent from in San Francisco, Germany, and the UK. Our team is highly accomplished and have worked for early stage and high growth startups, as well as research institutions including NASA. Rakugo’s engineering team consists of Dapp developers, machine learning engineers, blockchain protocol engineers, and technical leads with decades experienced. Our growth and marketing leadership is highly experienced in building community market places and monetizing and scaling digital content. In addition, we are also partnering and taking guidance from some of the most established digital media publications in the US, details of which will be announced once we close our funding round."
I will mention a few comments about the CEO and CTO, and leave links you for you to assess the team further yourself:
Brendan Playford - Founder and CEO -has a physics masters degree, but most of his work experience appears to be primarily in marketing. He did also found a mining company, Swift Mine Ltd, although I couldn't find a thing on google about this company.** Anyone else know anything about it?**
Wyatt Meldman-Floch - Founder and CTO - backend engineer, machine learning engineer, degree in Physics (BSc.) only. NASA intern (python). Nothing mentioned anywhere about previous experience with blockchain.
SUMMARY: Rakugo is an exciting, novel new content publishing platform, and the second of my knowledge to operates on the blockchain. It brings some valuable things to the table such as copyrighting, a team with fair experience that has composed a real, tangible business plan.That being said, it is not as new and revolutionary a technology as the steem engine, and looks like it will face some additional challenges because of this, including having to resort to ads and fees, something that steemit is free of to this day (8/5/2017 4:36:42 PM). Time will tell, as it is still very early, with more details to be revealed post-ICO, the user interface, etc.
Thanks for tuning in. Please feel free to offer any further insights or corrections to my summary of this new crypto company. Being new to this space, some things were over my head while reading the business plan and whitepaper, so I'd be happy if anyone wanted to take a look, having more knowledge in the blockchain business side of things, or technical computer side of things.