A33
Public Record
Excerpt from All Knowledge entry.

Frē

[…]

Although Frē was not the first company to develop a virtual economy, they are the most successful by a large margin. Through Frē’s business model, users voluntarily watch advertisements in order to earn a currency called frē, which they are allowed to spend within Frē’s entertainment content library. […] All of the content hosted in Frē Entertainment Inc.’s catalogue was created by a subsidiary of the company, Frē Productions Inc. […]

True to its name, Frē Productions has zero costs associated with the content they create. The company has grown to the point of being able to self-perpetuate its profits by relying on outside funding for all of the content they produce. Frē’s model is based on its relationship with its advertisers. Before describing Frē’s business model, it is important to note that Frē’s model creates a distinction between advertisers: the “commercial advertisers” and the “content advertisers.” The commercial advertiser acts on behalf of a company to create interactive advertisements for a single company. Frē shows commercial advertisements to its users in exchange for frē

The system is structured like so: advertisers fund artists’ content; artists and advertisers gain exposure because they are hosted on Frē; people pay attention to commercials to earn a virtual currency called frē (pronounced: frē); finally consumers pay Frē with frē money in order to interact with the artists’ content; finally commercial advertisers pay Frē with actual money, with the price increasing to be featured during more “active” parts of the day. In summation: Frē pays nothing for its content, pays nothing to host it, pays its users with a proprietary currency that cannot be exchanged or sold, and gets paid to do it. […] Because at the end of everything, it isn’t monetary gains they seek, it is the ongoing interest and attention of its user base.

Basically, Frē acts as a mid-point between content creators, advertisers, and their audience. Content creators submit ideas for potential content, alongside a budget detailing their content’s projected production costs. Frē Productions keeps a public picklist — updated daily — listing their content creators’ potential content and its projected production costs. Advertisers then submit offers to “buy” space in the content, which can then be approved or denied by the content’s creator. Once the advertisers’ bids match the content’s projected production cost, the content is created and added to Frē’s content library. […]

For example, a mattress advertiser might request one line of dialogue in a film, and they were willing to pay 20% of the production cost for it. The content creator then has the option to accept or decline the request, based on how much it will infringe upon her original intent; if she doesn’t think it is possible to organically include a line of dialogue from one of her characters about how comfortable this certain brand of mattress is, she can decline the advertiser’s. She can then continue wait for advertisers whose requests that she better aligns with until her project is funded. […]

With this model, there is no cost to Frē at any point of the production. […] Frē makes its money from advertisers, and adjusts its fee based on the time of day they display the ads to its audiences. People voluntarily interact with them for extended periods of time, and are then quizzed on the content at the end of each week. Quizzes are automatically populated at the end of each week, and the user’s scores determine how much frē (§) they will earn. Frē also adjusts current the value of frē, based on unstated variables. […] Users are incentivized to interact with certain content by featuring it on the front page, and also holds “Double-Up Events,” during which the featured content is worth double its normal value in frē. […] Frē also sponsors informational content, in which readers earn Frē by reading content on the Public Record. […]

The Frē strategy is this: Frē pays no cost for producing its content library, which its customer pay for with a virtual currency, which they earn by voluntarily watching advertisements, and companies pay Frē for advertisement time. […] Frē’s large library and zero-cost model allow for a broad user-base, and ensure, at least for the foreseeable future, that it will remain a staple of Remerican entertainment. […] Frē shapes popular culture by its massive influence. […] Because Frē plays such a large role in determining which content is delivered to the greater population, they have had an irrefutable influence on the arts. […]

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