The other day, I came across Thisisby.us, a User Generated Content (UGC) driven site where they share the revenue with with their writers. I signed up for it pretty quickly; several months ago I had contemplated launching a similar project, and I was interested in seeing how well the concept worked from a user’s perspective.
The concept is very solid. The deal is they share 50% of their daily revenue with their authors. An author gets paid based on the share of ‘Current Goodness’ his articles and comments generate on a given day. ‘Current Goodness’ is determined by a simple formula give over 24 hours:
Current Goodness is based on views and votes received in the last 24 hours. Current Goodness is equal to (1+Views received in the last 24 Hours)*Votes received in the last 24 Hours.
It is a good system - it is much fairer than other sites such as Digital Journal who pay by the vote alone, regardless of the page views. this system rewards writers who cover controversial topics which generate a lot of reads; under other systems, the writer may not receive any votes, since many of his readers will disagree with him or her.
To test it out, I created a generic content piece titled, ‘The 5 Worst Types of Drivers‘. Once the piece was published on the site, I submitted it to Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Netscape.
My article rapidly rose in the daily ranks on the site, and is currently sitting as the #2 article in the last 24 hours with 1072 views, 14 votes, and a ‘Current Goodness’ score of 15,022 current goodness at the time of this writing.
So, as the second most popular article, one would think I would walk away with a decent share of the site’s daily rewards. Think again.
The #1 article on the site for the last 24 hours is ‘Tempur-Pedic Beds and Sex Do Not Mix‘. This article has gone successful on Reddit & Digg, and is currently at a Current Goodness score of over 800,000.
So it will be getting the lion’s share of the profits from today. Not that I am bitter - I am not doing this for the monetary gain! Rather, I was curious how well the concept worked.
Having looked at the sites advertising, it appears that the site makes ~$150 / day from Blogads, and probably another $100 or so from CPM advertising. So, assuming a $250 daily budget, $125 of the goes to the authors. Assuming that the site authors get ~845,000 total ‘Goodness’ cumulative today, the #1 author is on track to get ~95% of the day’s earnings, about $118. Me, at #2, am on track for ~1.75% of the earnings, about $2.20. The remainder (~$4.80) will be split up among the site’s countless other authors.
The best conclusion to take from this is if anybody is writing articles on a site like this for the monetary aspect, you better hope your article becomes successful on a social network. If anyone else does, you will not make anything.
On the positive side, it quickly became apparent that the site has a rather vibrant community. People are very free with commenting and discussions. While there is criticism within the users, it is generally of a constructive sort, especially within the ‘fiction’ area.
If you enjoy writing, I would strongly recommend checking out Thisisby.us. It’s a very friendly, writer-oriented site with a helpful, accessible community. Don’t go with the intention of making money unless you think you can make it on a social network; you won’t make much, and you would likely be better off running your own site anyways.
Edit: Just to confirm what I said above about it not being for the money… well.. I just got back the results for this article, and I have made $0.48, far less than the $1.20 I estimated. C’ est la vie.
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