Work Boxers

Distributed Revenue Scheme

by Paul on October 5th, 2004

It’s always good if you can find writers to help you on your sites, especially if they are group collaboration type sites. While you would want everyone to volunteer and just write for the love of it, if you plan on bringing in money then I think it is only fair that you give them the same opportunity to earn some money as well.

On my two group blogs, Forever Geek and Bet Fest, I use a Distributed Revenue Scheme that helps the writers get rewarded for the work they put in. In the future I would love to use a Nick Denton type scheme and pay my writers a monthly salary, but until that day comes this is the approach I use.

The system is really quite simple. Every writer (if they choose) signs up for a Google Adsense account and whenever they write an entry their Adsense ID is used and they earn money for whatever clicks occur on that page. Hopefully this encourages them in two ways: 1) To write more frequently because more content means more pageviews and 2) To write better content because better content leads to more links, which leads to more pageviews.

If the writer decides not to signup for Adsense for whatever reason the ID simply defaults to my account.

Now you might be thinking that it would just be better to write your own content on your own site, but in certain cases I would disagree. To get people to visit your site it takes good content written on a frequent basis. The type of entries that are posted on Forever Geek and Bet Fest aren’t the ones that you can write in 2 seconds once or twice a week. On Forever Geek if you have 12 writers posting at least 2 entries a week you gain 24 new pages of content. If one of those entries is linked by another site that brings in more people who may surf around and visit the entries you wrote.

So in the end participating on a group blog helps all the parties involved when you actively participate.

This payment system isn’t biased since it is based on the amount of work you put in. If you don’t write you don’t get paid. If you write quality content and get the traffic then you do get paid. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

You could also do something like this on a site where you take user submissions. Tell the people who submit articles, reviews, etc. that their ID will show up 50% of the time (for example). I know of one person looking into doing this and it will be interesting to see how it works out. The benefit to the writer is that the money is good for the lifetime of the site. The downside is that it might not ever equal the amount they could get for publishing the article in a magazine and the payment is not done upfront.

Warning: If you go ahead and implement this scheme make sure that all the parties involve understand the consequence of using fraudulent clicks to boost their earnings.

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POSTED IN: Online Money