One creator I watch actively on YouTube is Nas Daily, who recently did a video promoting an Indian based social network Chingari.
Basic history on Chingari is it launched in 2018 as a competitor to TikTok, which is huge in India at 200 million users, even after its ban in 2020.
Chingari on the other hand wasn’t very popular until India banned TikTok in 2020, where it went from only a few hundred thousand downloads to over 50 million in a six month period.
The issue is after that, despite 107 million downloads, it’s suffered a clear peak.
Most Indian TikTokers have found alternatives to getting into TikTok and users have alternatives to get access on their phones.
The other bigger issue is Instagram has had Reels, which are more popular in India now over Chingari.
For Chigari, growth is at a plateau and users are leaving, so the company is marking themselves more with crypto and Nas Daily did a video promoting them, which I think was honestly pretty stupid.
Claims being made.
Claim One - People can own the internet now!
This one didn’t make much sense, where Nas said Chingari users owned the content they were uploading/making.
This sounds nice, but people actually already own the content being used on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.
When I upload a video on TikTok/Youtube, I do own it.
The idea people don’t actually own it is insane. It’d be like saying Warner Bros doesn’t own the clips to the movie ”The Batman”, because they uploaded on Youtube.
Content produced is own and claiming there’s some ownership in Chingari due to NFT’s, is just a joke.
Claim Two - Payments
A big bragging point to Chingari that Nas mentioned was they are paying users for content, with a digital currency they’ve created.
This is well, stupid.
YouTube
TikTok
Snapchat
Instagram
They all pay users for content based on views/watch time, but the big difference.
They pay in real money, not imaginary money!
An example of a much worse attempt on this was a startup called LBRY, which claimed to be a video platform paying people in crypto.
They had almost no users, but people would upload content and get “rewarded” in coins under the claim they were worth hundreds of dollars, despite being paid at rates that’d be 10,000% higher over what YouTube/TikTok would pay, despite LBRY having no noticeable ad model.
This is a common scam that Chingari is promoting.
Pretend to pay people more, by paying them a lot in fake money.
This is why despite Chingari having an obvious success at 100 million users, the idea they are trying to stay relevant over very silly wording with NFT’s and offering to pay people with a scam coin is insane.
Final thoughts
Nas Daily is one of the greatest creators to ever exist on social media.
I have a lot of respect for him, but that video was where I get really concerned with creators.
- Opening it by saying he just bought $500,000 of bitcoin.
- Connecting it to a company that has nothing to do with bitcoin, but claims to be in crypto.
- Making bizarre claims on owning content online.
- Having a course series, offering expensive courses on NFT’s, which are just a scam.
The last thing I like to see creators do is become flash preachers for the cult of easy money and I hope he avoids doing it.