Chinese App Selling Celebrity Time to Their Fans by the Second
Miao A, the Beijing based application was made in 2016 and claims itself to be the world’s first “time-trading platform”, helping to extract people’s potential and assists people in making them see or view whoever pleases them, as per the reports of Sixth Tone.
This app allows celebrities to sell their time by the second, enables fans to buy that time and assist the traders to invest it. Recently it has been brought under media scrutiny for apparently being operated as an illegal stock exchange.
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The company buys the time of celebrities from them or their agents in bulk, then sell it to the customers in uni-second packets something similar to a public offering.
The company makes profits by charging a three percent service fee on all the exchanges to make the transactions easy and clear, they are managed via an online payment platform NetEase—a tech giant.
The market for the app is driven by the Chinese fans with every second purchased a celebrity interaction could be availed. One second brings one line in a text-based conversation. For voice or video calls at least six hundred seconds need to be bought. The individuals willing to meet the celebrity personally need to buy a minimum of seven thousand two hundred seconds.
The app’s homepage shows a counter displaying the count of celebrity seconds spent. Below the counter, there are featured celebrities luring users to purchase their time. Above five hundred celebrities are present on the platform including show hosts, actors, businessman, music producers, athletes and even professional popular video game players.
One can even buy time to take lessons for learning any sports tricks or can take business consultations with entrepreneurs.
Like the stock exchange market, the value of celebrity’s seconds also varies. The trading hours are set between Monday till Saturday.
The app came under scrutiny because of the trading function otherwise it has government’s approval as an app but Miao A docks financial risks and technical issues.
Liu Xinyu—Dentos Law Offices-Attorney in Shanghai said that despite the company’s claims time is not something that could be traded, and the application violates the laws of stock exchange.
Replying to the concerns raised against the application the representatives of the firm informed that some measures have been adopted to manage the market like capping the maximum percentage by which the price can be raised from the initial price.
Despite the criticism the app is earning, many people were impressed to hear about Miao A and expressed their amazement with remarks like “awesome trading platform” or “time is money”.
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