TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Widely known as the leader of local hip-hop bands "L.A. Boyz" and "Machi" (麻吉), Jeffrey Huang (黃立成) is a perceptive entrepreneur in his own right.
One can even argue that the Taiwanese-American businessman has never shirked from seeking new challenges when it comes to creating companies and jobs.
Huang's recent ventures include creating Taiwanese professional E-Sports team Machi 17 and an app called 17.
17, officially referred to as "One Seven" in Mandarin, was created by the entrepreneur's startup, 17 Media. The app is the company's flagship social media platform and focuses on live-streaming and the uploading of video content as its main business model.
Featuring over a million daily active users and over 2,000 daily content creators, the platform is currently one of the most popular mobile applications in Taiwan, and it competes among a pantheon of social media giants including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
But unlike its competitors, which generally focus on photo sharing or recorded videos, 17 focuses on the possibilities live-streaming has to offer.
"We are the live-streaming social media," Huang told The China Post. "The biggest part is it's live."
What sets 17 apart even more from its big competitors is its revenue-sharing business model, which, unlike YouTube, does not put a minimum viewer requirement on its content creators before they can receive a cut of the app's earnings. After a user uploads content to 17, the user receives payment for their content, with amounts determined by the viewership and popularity of uploaded content.
This model encourages users to create interesting videos that better promote the creators and draw a following to the platform.
"We revenue share any revenue we receive for your content," Huang said. "You want to check out your friends' birthday pictures, or maybe (of) a party we were at together; I go look at pictures, I'm gonna see some ads. When I see those ads (on Facebook), all that revenue goes to Facebook. None of it goes to you or me. So, they don't revenue share that. We revenue share everything, from photos, to videos to live streams."
The policy empowers its users to monetize their social media content, teaching them that their content is their very own intellectual property.
"When it comes to personal content like our photos and whatnot, there's value there. And I like empowering people to make money off of their intellectual property that, right now, is kind of given away for free."
Huang explained that he had gotten the idea of respecting the content of social media creators from his experiences as a songwriter who, to this day, continues to receive royalties for either writing or composing a piece of music.
Inspiration
He also said his experience as a fellow media user inspired him to enable revenue sharing for all users regardless of the viewership of their materials.
"What I like now (about the app) is the empowering of the people — empowering them to monetize on their personal content."
The app and the company behind its creation adopted the name "17" because combining the numbers' Chinese characters forms two homophonic puns: "unity" (一起) and "personal loyalty" (義氣). That sense of loyalty toward people is arguably Huang's personal code when it comes to his business, which is apparent from the countless hours Huang and his team have dedicated to improving their product for users.
全文詳閱《The China Post 》：https://goo.gl/8oqiQv
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