Replies to post #12062 on Lingerie Fighting Championships Inc (BOTY)

[Penny City Sharps]

Wow, 2 failed companies partnering up after being in business many years. What could go wrong? Display is the old Tsu company, here’s some excerpts.

Tsu was originally launched on October 21, 2014. The 1st version was closed down August 2016. In 2019 the relaunch of the platform was announced with a more sustainable version. However, this model failed.

No big surprise here: Tsu, a social network that worked around the App Store’s rules on pay-per-installs, incentivized its users to create content, rewarded people for signing up friends, and got banned from Facebook for spamming, has now shut down. Yes, “pay you to post” and “pay you to friend” turns out to be an unsustainable business model, after all. According to a message on the Tsu website, the company claims it failed to raise an additional round of funding to keep its social network alive.

You may remember Tsu as the network that made a big stink about getting booted off of Facebook, at the time claiming it was the unjust victim of censorship. In reality, Tsu was spamming. Tsu had violated Facebook’s Platform Policy that forbids developers from incentivizing content because it “encourages spammy sharing and a bad experience” for Facebook users, the company told Wired last year in response to Tsu’s ban.

Despite the startup’s decision to go the incentivized route, the company claimed in 2015 to have 2 million users. With the shutdown this month, Tsu says it had seen 5.2 million users on its platform. However, according to data from mobile intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Tsu only had 1.5 million downloads worldwide across both iOS and Android. That’s not active users, but app installs.

The service was also available via the web, but it never reached the mainstream. In fact, the only people who seemed interested in Tsu were social media marketers and the SEO/SEM crowd.

Tsu was a problematic social network, if there ever was one. Its payment scheme was a bit like multi-level marketing – users were paid based on the engagement with the content they shared on the network, and how many other new users they recruited. Tsu’s plan was to keep 10 percent of the total ad revenue for itself, while half the remainder went to users and the other half to the network that brought the content creator to the platform. This encouraged Tsu users to grow their networks in order to make more money.


Tsu is now rebranded as Display 3 months ago. Seems fitting two 8 year “start ups” should partner together.