tsu-logoForward: Tsū stylize the “u” in their name but in an effort to keep things simple, hereafter I simply refer to the company as “Tsu” (pronounced “sue”). /end forward

There is no information on the Tsu website indicating who owns or runs the business.

The Tsu website domain (“tsu.co”) was first registered on July 21st 2010. The registration details were last updated on the 28th of January 2014, possibly indicating that this is when the current owner(s) took control of the domain.

Unfortunately the domain registration is set to private, so no details of ownership are disclosed.

A listing on Angel List, an investor website, reveals the company founders to be Sebastian Sobczak (Chief Executive Manager), Drew Ginsburg (VP of Business Development) and Thibault Boullenger.

sebastian-sobczak-drew-ginsburg-thibault-boullenger-cofounders-tsu

The listing cites Tsu as being based out of New York and if it’s to be believed, Tsu has had $8 million invested into it this year. Sobczak is the sole credited investor.

I wasn’t able to find an MLM history for either of Tsu’s co-founders, indicating that this is their first MLM venture either as an affiliate or as company owners.

Read on for a full review of the Tsu MLM business opportunity.

The Tsu Product Line

Tsu’s product is a social network platform co-founder Sebastian Sobczak claims has been six years in the making:

six-years-to-develop-tsu-sebastian-sobczak-twitter

From the company’s website,

Tsū is a free social media payment platform. With tsū, users can monetize all social content.

Users can be subsidized by 3rd parties (advertisers, partners and sponsors) while socializing, searching, listening to music, transacting, etc.

Joining the Tsu social network as a user (affiliate) is free.

The Tsu Compensation Plan

The Tsu compensation plan revolves around users publishing content which Tsu then monetizes (primarily with advertising).

If a tsū user’s post is viewed, that post creates economics – at the very least an advertisement is served alongside that post which is revenue.

Tsū simply arranges these revenues to trickle to the users as royalties via our algorithm.

This algorithm splits 90% of the revenue generated by monetization of published content with Tsu’s user-base.

In its simplest form, tsū is a payment platform attached to a user-owned social network and we are simply guiding payments to users based on royalties collected from 3rd parties.

Revenue is paid out using an infinite unilevel compensation structure.

A unilevel compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a unilevel team, with every personally recruited affiliate placed directly under them (level 1):

unilevel-commission-structure

If any level 1 affiliates go on to recruit new affiliates of their own, they are placed on level 2 of the original affiliate’s unilevel team. If any level 2 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 3 and so on and so forth down a theoretical infinite number of levels.

Commissions are paid out using what Tsu refer to as “the rule of infinite thirds”.

33% of the total revenue collected is paid out to the affiliate whose social profile the monetized content was originally posted on. Their upline, the affiliate who recruited them, is paid 33% of the remaining 66%.

This leaves 45.22% of the revenue raised, of which 33% is paid to the next upline affiliate (the affiliate who recruited the affiliate who received the second 33% payment).

In this manner, the system continues to pay upline via the unilevel, paying out 33% of whatever percentage of the revenue remains. Eventually this sum will be rounded up or down until the entire 90% revenue sum is paid out.

Joining Tsu

All users of the Tsu social network are affiliates. There is no cost to join.

Conclusion

Another MLM social network attempting to monetize user content and activity?

Apart perhaps from their “rule of infinite thirds” compensation plan, Tsu doesn’t bring anything new to the MLM social network niche.

We’ve seen countless companies launch in this niche and ultimately go anywhere. This is primarily for two reasons.

The first is that direct monetization of user content and activity as it is doesn’t bring in all that much revenue. It might for Tsu, considering they skim 10% off company-wide, but for the average user who is restricted to commissions rolling up from their unilevel team, it isn’t going to be much.

Split it into thirds and it’s less again. The idea is obviously that you have a massive downline pumping up fraction amounts to you, but aside from those who get in early and have massive numbers of affiliates under them – this isn’t going to reflective of your typical Tsu user.

The other reason is a lack of participation. Adding a monetization component to a social network sounds good in theory, but if that’s the sole innovation the company is bringing to the niche, people don’t migrate.

Why? The network is usually a sub-par clone of an existing network or 1:1 at best. In order to be successful a network would need to attract people who gave a damn about earning a few cents as well as those who don’t.

Those who don’t, evidently the bulk of social network users given the long list of failed MLM social network startups, won’t bother migrating because all there’s no need to.

One need only look at the Facebook privacy debacles and continued use of the platform to realize just how reluctant social network users are to migrate. Google Plus is another good example.

What typically happens in a social network MLM is it launches, a few early adopters spam the crap out of it (“it’s free to join, you’ve got nothing to lose!”), the network fills with affiliates chatting to eachother about how wonderful the network is for a few months and then it dies off.

Organic adoption, which is all that really counts, is next to 0.

In the absence of bringing anything new to the social network niche, I’m not seeing how Tsu is going to be any different.