Introducing Taki
Creators, Athletes and Celebrities Earn Nearly 100% of Each Fan Transaction
New Era for Personalized Content Extending Well Beyond Birthday Shoutouts
Today, I’m pleased to officially unveil Taki, a new personalized video platform for creators, athletes and celebrities to interact directly with their fans. Taki aims to remove the hurdles between creators and fans, and generate new income streams for creators. Taki looks to rapidly evolve video interactions from soundbite birthday wishes with high fees to something much more community driven.
Imagine being able to ask your favorite creator, athlete or celebrity a direct question, have them teach you a skill or even seek out their advice. In an era of hyper connectivity, it should be simple, but unfortunately, it’s been made needlessly complicated by social platforms that are too big to care about any individual creator or fan. They want to establish deeper connections but existing video and social platforms do not offer reasonable business models.
Taki is a game changer. While other sites take a quarter of the cut in service fees for quick disposable messages, we pay our roster 95.5% of the booking. Furthermore, we are partnering with creators, athletes and celebrities of all levels to usher in a new era of personalized content experiences tailored specifically to the fan like tutorials, AMAs, personal advice, playful roasts and more.
We quietly launched in beta last month and have already attracted more than 100 creators, athletes and celebrities including, Amanda Nunes, Garry Tonon, Ya Girl Ari, The Fung Bros, and Alliestrasza. And we’re adding great new talent every single day.
Here’s how it works: creators set their own price, choose which fan requests to fulfill and make the video on their own smartphone or computer. The video is immediately delivered to the fan, who can then share with friends on social, send as a gift, or simply enjoy on their own in private. It’s that simple…but with endless possibilities. If a creator can offer personalized content that appeals to just 100 super fans, they’d be able to earn well over six figures annually.
We’re not there yet, but we have been working closely with creators to design experiences and exclusive personalized content that will be of great value to their fans. In just a short time, we’ve already seen some impressive experiments that offer a glimpse into the great things to come.
More than 30 orders were received in 48 hours when hip hop duo Year of the Ox offered fans playful personalized raps. Fans showed amazing creativity: one requested a diss track against a disease his brother was battling, while another fan got the guys to help him ask someone out on a date. While the Year of the Ox is an emerging group, their creative approach and direct pitch helped drive interest from both new and existing fans proving that Taki could be a useful tool for new artists to build a fanbase, while also finding a new revenue stream that could supplement income between performances.
Similarly, singer Jasmine Villegas is experimenting with Taki to offer a small group of fans the world premiere of her new music video, a day before its release to the rest of the world. The possibilities are limitless for what this could mean for the music industry from a monetization and creativity standpoint.
To drive sales for his merch line, popular Twitch streamer GernaderJake partnered with Taki for an amazing offer for fans: a gift card to his merch store for the first 5 fans that bought a Taki. He promoted the experiment on Twitch and the 5 spots were quickly snatched up in less than 40 mins, a great early sign that Taki could jumpstart a merch sale.
And earlier this week, we announced we’re partnering with UFC fighter Suga Sean O’Malley for an exclusive four-part short-form video series and signed training gloves for his forthcoming fight at UFC 248 against Jose Quinonez. For only $5, fans can gain access to the series that offers a behind-the-scenes confessional as he trains and preps to return to the octagon for his first official fight in nearly 2 years. In addition, Suga Sean is offering one fan worn and signed training gloves, plus access to the four-part video series for $225.
Taki is just the first-step. Rally, the company behind Taki, will soon launch a blockchain network that will power the world’s first creator-owned economy. What does this mean? It means enabling creators and fans to exchange, store and timeshift value. We’re still at the beginning of a megatrend of new internet-famous creators that are building worldwide audiences. However, they’ve built their businesses on social platforms that take all or the lion’s share of the monetization, fan data, and distribution power. Rally will allow these creators new vectors for monetizing their brand and fan interactions. For example, with Taki, creators earn nearly 100% of each booking. We respect that creators have taken great care to cultivate followings across multiple social media networks, so we’re not creating another social media network. Instead, we’re designing the network to be fluid across existing social media platforms.
I’ve recruited a dream team of execs from Kabam, YouTube, Facebook, Disney, Twitch and more to build this much-needed ecosystem and then work closely with creators as we march to the eventual goal of having the network be fully-creator driven.
Together, we will build a bright future for creators and fans.
Kevin Chou, CEO and Co-Founder of Rally
