[New feature] Send us a virtual gift

Christmas isn’t the only season for gifting. If you’re familiar with live streaming applications, the logic of virtual gifting shouldn’t be a stranger to you. Here’s why

Much like the popular apps such as BIGO, Seventeen or even our homegrown BeLive; virtual gifting is a form of rewarding their hardworking broadcasters by sending items like “beer”, or – if you’re a fan of BIGO – a “dream castle”. Each of these gifts have a value attached to them.

In BIGO, you basically buy diamonds using cash; using these diamonds, you can buy virtual gifts and “gift” them to broadcasters that you support. If memory serves me right, A “dream castle” is 888 diamonds. The broadcaster, on the other hand, gains beans; and they get to cash out these beans to cash. Based on the similar concept, instead of diamonds and beans; we have points!

For those less familiar with live streaming, most of you should have heard of Kickstarter or some form of a crowdfunding platform, am I right?

In some way, our gifting feature is a heavily simplified version of those platforms above.

For Kickstarter, there’s a process you need to follow to get your post out there. To be able to achieve your goal, quite a bit of pre and post-marketing is needed. Every pledge has a value and you can fix that value. When and if you hit that goal, you get to cash out the proceeds.

Similar to the logic but more targeted to “arts” oriented projects, you can post your project like how you’d post an Instagram post, and get people to gift you (a virtual gift works like a pledge).

Pretty straightforward, ain’t it? The plus here, you don’t have to hit an actual goal to gain the proceeds. Every virtual gift earns you a certain number of points, and almost instantly you gain that value in your virtual PINC “wallet”.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We, the platforms, do take a cut when such a transaction takes place; some less, some more.

To sustain and enhance our platform and provide a better experience for our users who will be using this platform for a long time, this “cut” we take basically subsidises the overheads we incur in order to make the platform sustainable. Hence, we thank you for your support.

Whenever you feel a content creator is deserving and hesitate if it’s worth your buck – remember, you’re essentially helping in making PINC better and rewarding the content creator for an awesome work done.

What goes around comes around. Essentially, we grow together!

That’s all, for now, folks, till the next post.