On Thursday, September 19th, Narrative participated in NEO Global Development’s (NGD) English NEO LIVE event. NEO LIVE is an Ask Me Anything (AMA) style community event that takes place on the official NEO Telegram channel. In addition to the English event, NGD also hosts weekly NEO LIVE events in Chinese via WeChat.

Narrative is a US-based company which brands itself as the world’s public journal, a “self-sustaining content society where members are in charge and get paid, and the world’s best content, on every subject imaginable, is easy to find.” The project aims to disrupt the traditional business model for social media networks by sharing 85% of monthly revenue with users who “take part in creating and maintaining a reputable environment” using NRVE, its ecosystem currency. This includes users who engage with content, content creators, niche owners, moderators, and members who participate in governance.

Four members from the Narrative team participated in the AMA, and addressed questions regarding its upcoming “Publications” feature, development plans, and its economic reward model.

Songping: Hi everyone, welcome to the 8th NEO Live on Telegram! This is Songping Que from the NEO marketing team. I haven’t moderated this session for a while, it’s exciting to be back. I will be your host tonight.

We have a big team from Narrative tonight.

Rosemary O’Neill: Hi everyone, happy to be here!

Molly O’Neill: Hi everyone

Ted O’Neill: Hello everyone!

Brian Lenz: Hello! 👋

Songping: Welcome!

Before the session starts, I would like to repeat the background of the NEO Live initiative in case that you are new to the group. NEO Live is a marketing initiative from NEO Global Development, to bring latest blockchain knowledge and NEO news to the community. It’s one hour live chatting every Thursday night 8pm (UTC+8) in NEO official Telegram group (https://t.me/NEO_EN). NGD core teams/NEO eco project leaders/NEO dev community leaders/pioneering blockchain leaders will be invited to share the latest technological developments and industry insights with the community members.

So, a quick intro to the guests tonight: 

  • Ted O’Neill, co-CEO of Narrative. Ted is a pioneer in UI design and development, originator of BBCode, viral marketing innovator.
  • Rosemary O’Neill, co-CEO. Rosemary is a two-time successful tech entrepreneur, helping people build online communities since 1998.
  • Brian Lenz, CTO. Brian is a proven software engineer with more than 18 years of experience in software development, infrastructure, and security.
  • Molly O’Neill, COO. Molly is an award winning former public sector CIO recognized for leadership, vision and innovation.

Narrative team has come a long way with NEO. It is building a new content economy. What they are doing is solving the challenges facing “big social” by putting total control in the hands of the people using the platform, and giving them the lion’s share of the rewards as well. So team, feel free to start your sharing.

Rosemary:

Our token is called NRVE, it is an NEP-5 token.

We’ve got an upcoming release that will add Publications to the mix and we’re excited to talk about that!

Ted: Publications are branded spaces within the content network that give organizations control over the content they publish – who can write and edit for the publication, for example, while still offering rewards for writers.

Rosemary: If anyone has any questions, we’re ready!

Songping: Cool, then let’s start the Q&A session!

For anyone who wants to ask new questions, to make it easy for the team to trace the question, please kindly number your questions, following the previous. Please keep the questions about NEO and Narrative, we will remain the right to select the questions. Also the team won’t make comments on the token price.

Q1: How are publications different from Niches?

Ted: Niches are unique subject areas in Narrative that are basically the classification system for all content in the network. All content can be tagged into Niches. Niches are suggested and approved by the community to ensure uniqueness. Anyone can post content to a Niche, subject to approval by Niche moderators to ensure that the content suits the subject. Publications on the other hand are channels that are controlled by specific owners, designed to allow the publication admins to serve their own editorial perspective– perfect for organizational blogs, magazines, etc.

Q2: Are there plans for an Android app?

Brian: We do have plans to support mobile apps (both iPhone and Android), but that’s a little farther out on our development roadmap, so we don’t have an ETA on when it will be available right now. You can see the full roadmap and what’s coming up on our website: https://about.narrative.org/roadmap

Q3. How do your rewards work, and what is your NRVE token used for in the platform?

Ted: NRVE is the currency for the network, used for all transactions – incoming revenue and outgoing rewards. All incoming revenue is stored in a rewards pool that is valued in NRVE and we pay out rewards to all members on a monthly basis, based on their overall contributions to the network. 60% of all rewards are paid to content creators, 15% to the company, 10% to Niche owners, 6% to Niche moderators, etc. Basically, we have a formula for paying rewards, so everything is fairly distrubuted based on real contributions. Having those rewards recorded on the blockchain using NEO provides transparency.

Currently, our revenue is dependent on Niche ownership fees, since we do not support advertising yet. However, the release of Publications will add the next major revenue source for the system, so we are quite excited to be able to execute on that major piece of our development plan. (We also supplement rewards with a token mint over the first 15 years.)

Q4: What are some lessons learned from the Beta so far?

Brian: In order to bootstrap the development process (particularly for the initial alpha), we licensed a proprietary software platform upon which to build the initial alpha. This worked out extremely well, as it allowed us to launch the alpha at the end of the token sale in March 2018. Over the rest of 2018, we made a significant amount of changes to the underlying software architecture in order to modernize the platform. One of the biggest lessons we learned is that modernization process takes a lot of time and effort. The beta was delayed a little bit as a result, but the modernization has paid dividends once it was completed. The beta launch was a big success, and we’re pleased with how it turned out 🙂

Q5: Do you think that Narrative will attract non-crypto audiences to learn more about crypto?

Rosemary: Yes, absolutely! That’s part of our mission, and we already have attracted a lot of non-crypto Narrators. We plan to make it easy to take out rewards in regular currency in the future. We’ve seen excitement from new members as they turn their NRVE into money…in fact one member bought a cow with his earnings!

Ted: We don’t view Narrative as a crypto content network. It happens to use crypto for transparency and security, but our goal is to create a content network that everyone loves… those who are into crypto and those who have no idea what it is. 😊

Q6: What are the next priorities for development?

Brian: We are aiming to complete the Publications release in the next few weeks. Beyond that, we are planning to move on to Notifications so that users can be notified (both within the platform and through email) of important activities (replies to your posts, mentions, etc.). Down the line, we plan to support Tribunal nominations by January 15, 2020. You can see the full roadmap on our website: https://about.narrative.org/roadmap

Q7: What you think are Narrative’s advantages, compared to other content platforms, such as Medium?

Rosemary: For one thing, there’s no paywall. We’ve got monetization baked in from the beginning, so we won’t have to keep shifting our strategy. In Narrative, anyone can post quality content and get seen.

Molly: And we are amplifying reach by cross posting to niches.

Songping: Thank you, Narrative team, for participating the NEO Live tonight! It seems that we can close the session a little bit early than before.

Rosemary: Thanks for the invitation!

Ted: Thank you!

Molly: Thanks for having us!

Brian: Thank you everyone for being here and for your questions! 👍

Songping: Thank you again everyone for participating tonight!!!

Please be noted that our guest for next week is Bruce Liu, founder of NEL & FutureDAO. NEL is one of the earliest NEO dev communities in China. It has developed several NEO ecosystem infrastructure tools such as NNS (NEO Name Service), Teemo extension wallet, NEORay contract development tool, NEO blockchain explorer and so forth. He will talk about DAICO/the next hot topic for DeFi.

Note: Some edits have been made for formatting and readability. The full conversation can be found at https://t.me/NEO_EN/24796.

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