Paying Blog Authors

I plan on immitating the Engadget model (Weblogs Inc) of paying bloggers for their work. However, in order to do this, the site obviously needs sufficient revenue. Assuming that the site revenue problem is solved, how would one track and pay authors for their contributions? Ideas? Thoughts?

• Post Points: 20 |

Good question. It would be so great to be able to say to my bloggers that they will generate cash from their blogs - especially as I'm in a position to provide a really great blogging platform to them, and help direct them to resources to help them become better bloggers (the vast majority on my community have no idea what a blog is, so I have some educating to do).

I've been thinking these lines of splitting advertising income with bloggers and have found as many questions as answers:

• Google AdSense revenue can be split into "channels", so you could do a revenue share on that. So you can run reports to say how much revenue was there in channel "peter" over the last month, and it'll show you. AdSense limits it to 200 channels though, which is a problem. Another problem is that it only works each blog is owned by one person - shared blogs won't work so well as you won't know who to assign the revenue to - all you can do is track total revenue for that particular blog and maybe do a share on that.
• You could track the number of ad clicks, and pay an average revenue share for each click. i.e. estimate the revenue from a click on a blog ad, and give a % of that to the blogger.
• If there are a set of blogs by subject, with several people posting to each subject blog, how can the revenue be fairly split between the posters? e.g. if 80% of the posts on a blog are by one blogger, should he get paid more (what if his posts are rubbish, and the minority are providing the value)?
• Many blogs will contain ads from different sources, meaning tracking the actual revenue generated becomes very hard as you need to integrate with the ad supplier's reporting systems. So tracking clicks may work better.
• Advertising could be sold on a CMP basis on a set rate - that way bloggers can be paid on the basis of a split of page impressions (i.e. readers) rather than clicks. But this doesn't serve the advertisers well - the aim should be for the blog to be very profitable by introducing the right people to the right product, and per-click ads are a much better way to achieve that.
• Ideally, the system should be automatic. Any manual intervention will increase administration costs and risk the system failing to work for everyone.

What is your current plan to implement this? Do you know how engadget works the split?

I'm very keen to do this, but it's hard to see from a practical perspective how it would be done.

Ollie

 

• Post Points: 20 |

FYI: for revenue sharing check out with this developer is doing.  

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/faq.php?faq=revenue_sharing

We should be able to EASILY offer users something like this in CS-to help communities generate some cash.

• Post Points: 20 |

That is a great idea. That should be an easy addition to cs as a module.

• Post Points: 20 |

Holy crap, that's a beautiful idea. It's always the simple ones isn't it. So to do this in CS I imagine what needs doing is to:

• The ability for a user to specify the AdSense ID and channel in their profile
• A way to merge that data into the advert HTML before it is rendered (after checking the validity of the AdSense ID - it must be valid). So for example if CS sees "ADSENSE_ID" in the ad text, it swaps it out for the ID code in their profile If the user profile is blank, use the site's AdSense ID.

With these two simple changes:

• The user can sign up with AdSense, and put their ID and channel info into their profile
• Ads are shown as normal, either static, or in rotation using ASP.NET, or a third-party tool.
• The webmaster just sets the rotation to contain two AdSense ads - one that includes the site's AdSense ID and channel, and one that that includes a merge-field like "ADSENSE_ID" and another "ADSENSE_CHANNEL". The rotation percentage can then be set according to the revenue share. So if it's 50/50, the ads are set to rotate alternately.

Another decision that needs to be made by CS is how to decide which user to render the ad for. But as far as I can see the choice is a) the person who started the thread (or top-most blog entry), or b) a random user from the page (page, not thread). Of those I think the former will just encourage people to needlessly start threads, so the latter seems a sensible default.

So if CS sees an advert containing the ADSENSE_ID or ADSENSE_CHANNEL merge-fields, it swaps them out for the appropriate AdSense data from the profile (or central config), and we then see the following benefits:

• Users get paid by the site!
• They are thereby encouraged to post more
• They an likely to come back more regularly
• They are likely to interact more
• They will learn to appreciate the adverts on the site (many currently hate them)
• They will associate the site with free money (fantastic for marketing!)

I am very excited at the community that this is likely to create and can't believe I haven't seen it before.

It seems that there also need to be settings somewhere (central config) for specifying:

• Minimum age for a poster to be considered (i.e. days since registration)
• Minimum number of posts before ads are shown (i.e. newbies have to "earn" the income)
• Perhaps also say posters need to achieve a certain score before they get revenue?
• A global field for the default AdSense ID and channel.

One area I must admit I'm stumped on is how CS would parse the adverts. Some of mine are rendered in iframes, but I imagine I can reconfigure all that so that CS renderes them, in order to get this working.

I expect what I'd do is add one new AdSense block right after the first post in a thread/blog, and do a 50/50 share on that. I'm currently not up to the limit of three AdSense blocks and one link-unit, so this works well for me - I can retain existing revenue to invest in improving the site, but also offer effectively free income to forum users. This is bloody fantastic!

Am I making any sense? Can this be done as a module?

Ollie

 

 

• Post Points: 5 |

I've looked further into this, and there is another critical element to consider. If a community user opens an AdSense account, sets their details in the profile, and then ads start appearing on posts and threads they have posted, they can click on their own ads to generate revenue for themselves. Of course this won't happen for long because their AdSense account will be closed due to this click fraud, which I expect would be picked up quickly. Another down side of this is that if an AdSense account is closed, ads won't be shown, so revenue is lost.

A related issue is that for anyone responsible using the site, they will be concerned to AVOID their AdSense account being closed, so will become nervous about clicking on ANY AdSense ads for fear of damaging their account and losing the income (small as it is likely to be).

To deal with these two issues it seems to me that when a user views a page, the ad system must ensure that no AdSense ads are shown using their AdSense ID. i.e. the system is designed specifically to ensure no-one sees their own ads, and therefore is unable to click on them. To do that it must only insert a user's AdSense ID into the ads if that user is not viewing the page. Of course this isn't fool proof (they can sign out) but the system becomes fairly well protected against blatant fraud.

DigitalPoint.com has been doing this since 2004, so Google are clearly comfortable with it. But then given that site generates five figures if AdSense income each month, I imagine they will work with the site owner to reach a compromise anyway.

Ollie

 

• Post Points: 5 |

I'm pushing ahead with this.

I've put a post up asking my community members for feedback, and what I'm hearing so far is that they want payments directed to people that post large numbers of valuable posts. So this could fit in very well with the points system.

If we create a CS module to insert an ad between, say, the first and second forum posts on a page, is it possible to select a user (to get the ad revenue) randomly, but with a weighting based on their points?

What I can then do is encourage users to rate more posts, because the net result is a financial one, where valuable posters get paid more and people who post rubbish get paid less.

I've emailed the Google AdSense team in the UK today, laying out my plans and asking for their blessing. It'll be interesting to see what they say. I am expecting them to say they don't necessarily approve but as long as I'm within the Terms and Conditions it's ok - though I will press them to approve or disapprove before I do it because I am not prepared to risk my AdSense account being closed.

Ollie

 

• Post Points: 5 |

I've had a response to a long email I sent to Google explaining my intentions, and broadly they seem to accept that what I am proposing is acceptable, within certain limits:

• The number of advert blocks and link units must be within their limits (three, and one)
• It is ok to have AdSense ads on a page with different publisher IDs (good!)
• It is ok for the community server site to use a referral (commission-paying) link to refer people to sign up with AdSense. i.e. if 250 of your users sign up with AdSense as a result of your revenue sharing, you are paid up to $25,000 in commissions by Google ($100 for each AdSense account opened, where the account goes over $100)
• But there is bad news.... they say that when someone applies for an AdSense account, they must specify the URL of the site they will put ads on, WHICH MUST BE 100% UNDER THEIR CONTROL. So when someone signs up with AdSense, they cannot list the Community Server site as their site, they must have their own site, and they must get approval for that account being opened. This may mean some users simply cannot get at the revenue share because they can't get an AdSense account.

So it looks like this is a goer for me. The challenge now is to get the upgrade to v2.0 done, and then start looking at how to implement this so that the extra profile fields are there, and the ads are being shown.

Ollie

 

• Post Points: 20 |

Ollie,

Nice work, way to get creative!

• Post Points: 5 |

ollie any luck with this?

• Post Points: 20 |

Can anyone tell me if this picked up any steam and came to completion? I'm looking at implementing this same scenario.

 Thanks!

• Post Points: 5 |