Monetized intent

[Originally published on Cent]

When I hear anyone talk about intent or intentionality, I do two things.

First I get pretty excited because I can basically count on the fact that whatever comes next will be intellectually stimulating. That's what happened after I read @tor's post from a couple days ago entitled 'Social Media and the Power of Intention'.

The other thing I do is think about monetizable intent.

Monetizable intent - specifically the capture, tracking and exploitation of intent - is what made Google and Facebook what they are today. Think AdWords or AdSense for Google and Facebook's insanely hyper targeted advertising capacity.

Intentions are desires, needs, wants, and likes. The ability to aggregate every intention of basically every person on earth (e.g. via a Google search or by clicking 'like'), every result list provided, and then every next step taken as result overlaid on top of webs of social context, well this essentially allows companies to reliably 'predict' or 'guess' what you want to see.

And their guesses are pretty good. But they have made hundreds of billions of dollars for guesses that're based off of *your* monetizable intent; and you, well, you get another cat meme or buzzfeed listicle.

What if the need for guess work (i.e. the work in the form of algorithm development and complicated targeted advertising infrastructure that is the justification of these companies to pocket all that money) largely disappeared? What if you could monetize your own intentions?

In a pretty conspicuous way, that seems to be the case on Cent. Intent is literally monetized when someone Seeds a post or tips another user's reply.

Instead of an algorithm serving up content that Google or Facebook were essentially paid to present you with based on them monetizing your previously expressed intentions, anyone can add bounties to their posts to draw engagement and support from others.

Moreover since money is involved users seem to be extremely supportive of one another and thoughtful in their interactions.

In their post, @tor's main critique of older social networks seems to be the fact that those social networks don't provide anywhere near the amount of personal, emotional and professional support that makes life for everyone good.

Cent seems to be solving for that, but by also allowing users themselves to aggregate their own monetized intent in the form of seeds and tips they've given, based on the fact that Google and Facebook are earning tens of billions of dollars a year guessing what you'd spend money on and like, Cent could also be unlocking the potential for users to earn way more money down the line - whether that would be from Advertisers paying individuals directly or by some other way remains to be seen.

The fact that these TXs of monetized intent take place on Cent's state channels (which are pretty opaque to outsiders) could also be beneficial to Cent the business...perhaps.