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"Write for the love and the rest will work itself out."
This has been our advice to everyone who has joined the Newsvine community since our launch in March. We're not paying people to contribute here, but rather letting people earn their own returns via the reasonable amount of advertising we've worked hard (along with Federated Media) to populate around the site.
Although our policy is to allocate earnings 45 days after the end of every month, we're so thrilled about August's results that we're releasing the numbers a few weeks early this month.
So without further ado, it is our pleasure to announce that the top Newsvine earner earned $414.27 in August!
That's right. Over $400 for writing a few very well written and extremely popular articles -- a number that represents a 90% ad split in favor of the user.
No doubt the most active members of the Newsvine community will now be checking their earnings pages to see what their own numbers look like. It is important to remember that the sole determinant for earnings right now is page views times ad revenue per page view. The top earner wrote articles that were linked far and wide on the web and thus resulted in a lot of readership during the month of August. In the future, we'd like to add other factors into the mix, but bear with us as we continue to develop the system. The site was also about 35% sold out in August so as we work to increase that number to somewhere around 70%, it will positively affect everyone.
Our philosophy from the beginning has been "where there is money to be made from your content, you will make most of it" and August's results are the first real fruits of that mantra... and only a month after ads started running!
While we're on the topic of advertising and payments, we also thought it might be useful to illustrate exactly how the flow of advertising and revenue works on Newsvine. With Google AdSense's ability to pay users out instantaneously (albeit frequently at paltry $.25 or lower effective CPMs) it's important to know the different way in which display advertising works. To the right is a diagram of the advertising schedule for August.
Here are the important points:
- August, like any month will be filled with a mix of "sold" ads and "remnant" ads. In August, we were about 35% sold out with the rest of the ads running as remnant. Sold ads carry healthy CPMs while remnant ads are much lower, although generally higher than AdSense.
- As you can see, each advertiser (including remnant networks) has a 120 day window after their campaign ends in which to pay for the campaign. This is unfortunately a very long window but it's standard in the ad industry and there's not a whole lot that can be done about it. Large companies don't pay for their advertising in advance with credit cards so the only option is to invoice them.
- Although we'd rather wait until *we* actually get paid in order to distribute earnings to users, we've struck a middle ground at 45 days. Our rationale is that after 45 days, the chance that payment will eventually arrive and be accurate is very high. In general, if a traffic data dispute or other irregularity (page view fraud, etc) arises, it would likely become apparent within the first 45 days. So the end result is that we are paying you before we get paid, but at a point where we feel confident that we will be able to recover that distribution on our end.
In conclusion, we hope that we've illustrated the process of ad revenue and earnings distribution at Newsvine. As always, we're open to new ideas about how we might improve the experience for our users and nothing is fixed in stone. We'd love to shrink the 45/120 day windows and will be working toward that goal to the extent that we can. Until then, continue enjoying Newsvine as we look forward to more growth into 2007!
