Yashi is an online gaming portal that allows flash game developers to upload their games to the website in exchange for a monthly revenue share and an exit bonus pool based upon their pro-rata of game plays on the website.
The founders of Yashi were previously the founders of a large online video sharing website (Bolt.com) that was sued by the largest music company (Universal Music Group) for allegations of copyright infringement under the DMCA (digital millennium copyright act). Through this process, we gained an appreciation for content creators and the value that they bring to portals like YouTube, Miniclip, Kongregate or Yashi.
Sites similar to Yashi have called themselves, "The YouTube of Games", which unfortunately is very true. Like YouTube, they intend to build their brand, traffic and shareholder value on the backs of the content creators that contribute to their site, without fairly compensating them in the eventual exit of their business. They will argue that unlike YouTube in their early days, they are providing a revenue share to the content creators in the short-term, but the big prize for YouTube was the eventual sale to Google for $1.65 billion, which the YouTube founders and investors did not share with the creators of the content that built their business!
Does this sound fair?
We feel that online gaming and the flash casual gaming industry is the next big market, and the content creators in this industry should profit from the sale of the next big gaming company if they're contributing their content and helping to create shareholder value.
That's why we built Yashi, and have introduced the concept of "Share Upside"!
Share Upside allows game developers to earn short-term cash through a revenue-sharing program, similar to Kongregate, where they can earn anywhere from 25% to 50% from the ads that are displayed around their games.
However, in addition to the revenue-share, Yashi has also developed a proprietary algorithm to share the upside of the eventual sale or financial exit of the business that owns Yashi.com (Yashi Media, LLC), in what we call the "exit bonus pool".
Upon the successful exit of Yashi Media, LLC, game developers will earn their pro-rata share in the business based on a variety of metrics on their game pages such as unique visitors, page-views, bounce rates, time spent, and more. Using our proprietary algorithm, game developers will earn points and upon the eventual sale or exit of Yashi Media, LLC they will earn their pro-rata share in a cash payout.
How would this have worked in the YouTube sale? Well, 1% of $1.65 billion is $16.5 million. Even a tenth of 1% (0.10%) would have yield a content creator $1.65 million in the sale to Google.
We're not suggesting that Yashi is the next YouTube and will someday sell for $1.65 billion, but we are suggesting that if Yashi sells for some amount in the future, the content creators that helped build it should get paid too.
As the saying goes, "content is king", and the content creators on Yashi will be rewarded as such!
