Platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch offer individuals an enticing opportunity – monetising their passions. But what makes this dream so powerful is the uncapped potential it offers. Even if you reach your dream job at your favourite company, the scope of your impact will be limited to your position within the company as would your compensation. Content creation platforms come with no such constraints.
Making decisions that increase the surface area of your luck, in other words, embracing higher variance within your life is an extremely powerful tool. People are subconsciously drawn to this and just like the allure of content creation, it’s responsible for the success of casinos, the lottery, and trading stocks/crypto. It is why so many people are enamoured with owning a business when data suggests it’s usually more work for less pay.
As a prediction markets site, Manifold would love to tap into this and enable people to make lots of money by forecasting and asking the right questions. Three-months ago during a Hackathon, I wondered how we could offer this when real-money trading was off the table due to regulatory challenges. Well, if we couldn’t pay the traders, what about the creators? Thus, the creator partner program was born. We now approach the end of the first quarter and I want to provide some insight into my thoughts when designing it, what we’ve learned so far, and what we plan to change.
And yes, since its inception we’ve announced prize point markets which, if things go as we hope, could lead to real cash prizes for traders. But even with this, we are still excited to see how we can reward creators for their work!
In essence, Manifold pays market creators real money based on how much value they bring to our site. In its current state that means $0.10 per unique trader on each market (in addition to the 10 mana all creators get), $1.00 for each new signup, and $10 if that signup comes back to trade on 5 days. A market must also have at least 20 traders to count with hopes that this discentivises creators from spamming lots of low-quality markets to get just a few traders on each.
To become a partner, one must surpass the minimum requirements of 1250 total traders and at least 10 markets in the past month with more than 20 traders. We made exceptions for people we thought could bring a lot of referrals to the site.
The primary, longer-term goal is to lay the initial building blocks for Manifold becoming a place where people can one day make a living creating questions.
A more immediate goal is to leverage our existing creators by incentivising more thoughtfulness when creating markets and rewarding those who can bring new users to our site. We want our creators to be excited to create markets and feel able to put a lot of effort into managing complex resolution criteria. This includes those striving to earn their place in the program in addition to those appointed partners.
The second goal is to target individuals with high social reach who would be great to have on Manifold but don’t care enough to use it when they could instead be engaging with their followers through other mediums that offer financial upside. Someone who spends 5 hours building their political Substack could sacrifice 1 of those hours to build an additional stream of relatively passive income by creating markets on Manifold.
The initial proposal was an entirely different program from what it is now. Originally I wanted to increase the cost to create a market by five times for partners and not pay them any of the usual mana bonuses. Then, only pay them USD if they hit 30 traders on their markets (for reference even our top creators only have around 30% of markets they create get more than 30 traders).
My thoughts behind this were as follows:
However, as expected with a 1-day old idea with minimal outside feedback, this design had some major oversights.
The first oversight was assuming a significant overlap between being mana-rich, being a power user, and being a big market creator. In reality, some of our biggest market creators are the most mana-poor users on our site as their mana is constantly tied up in liquidity in all the markets they create. Up to that point, I had subconsciously organised our users into 3 categories: Power users, casual users and new users. While this is a valid form of categorisation, it isn’t a helpful one for designing the creator partner program. The 3 distinct categories of users on our site I should have been considering were: creators, traders and viewers. While there is some overlap between these, oftentimes big creators are really bad traders. And while the power user traders are very rich, the same is not true of power user creators.