Startup Competing with Associatedcontent

Greetings fellow writers and entrepreneurs!

I have recently assembled a solid team to create a web portal to compete with Bukisa, Triond, and Asociated Content. Now, I pose this question to you:

What additions or subtractions would you like to see in a new competing website?

hi, up front payment for non US people?

Is it upfront payment, revenue share based on traffic/page views, or is it AdSense-based? (Or is that info under wraps?)

We are still deciding on which method of revenue we are going to choose. We have considered offering upfront payments to all people if the content is of great quality.

We are coding the website now so I wanted to get some ideas before we go any further.

What's your goal/thrust, besides beating AC and the others you mentioned? What are your distinctives?

If you could offer upfront payment for people in all your country, that will be one of uniqueness your website has.
Mostly, they only provide revenue sharing based system, not up front payment.
If you are dare to pay with fair price and in upfront period, I am sure that most of writers will write for your site.

Upfront payment for not only americans but also europeans and if possible everyone. That would be great. But be prepared to pay a shitload straight away if you launch and be full with articles.

decent upfront offers is all outsources/rewriters/original writers really care about. Sites like associatedcontent receive bullshit articles because of their lack of appreciation for content providers...

goodluck

No one is writing on AC or anywhere else to become famous. These writers (like me at one point) want $$$. You give the writers decent money for their work and they will write and submit articles to you in droves. Cut off the money flow and no one will remember your site name. Don't fuck with the writers.

It'd be nice to see something with good SEO that shows up in google news, like examiner does. It always helped me posting some snippets from my article into a blog I was trying to promote.

Offer upfront payments to all content providers, regardless of location and/or nationality. Just be strict about the quality and uniqueness of the content.

themvf said:

You give the writers decent money for their work and they will write and submit articles to you in droves. Cut off the money flow and no one will remember your site name. Don't fuck with the writers.

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Funny how ezinearticles receives a lot of high quality articles for free and they do not pay shit to their writers.

But there are dozens of knock-offs of EZA, and each offer the same Indian-giving arrangement---you provide them inventory through articles, and they let you link to your site. Only many people never go to your site because their site puts adsense ads on your article pages, so people go there instead.

The free site makes definite money now off of your free inventory, while you make only possible money later, or never. Many have realized this is largely a raw deal, and prefer the (initial) AC model of get paid now for your writing now, then hopefully more passive IM money later. This choice in the market gives a paid site a UMP advantage over the EZA free sites.

The additonal feature to stand out would be keyword analysis.

Reading through this thread, something is nagging me in a lot of the replies. There seems to be a general consensus that "decent upfront payouts" is what would draw a great deal of attention from writers, but if you ponder it from the flip side for a moment you can see there's an obvious flaw in that method.

I'm only mentioning this here because the OP might find some insights from my own experience. I run several article sites, mostly auto-fed with articles, but I'm also a partner on one that pays writers and this was something we [partners] struggled with pre-launch a few years ago too.

We ended up going with a CPM payout based on page views because it ultimately proved to be the most fair to writers, and controllable for us in the event that the site began losing money we would have the option of lowering CPM rates. As it turned out we were making good money from the start and we actually raised CPM rates instead.

The main reason I think the CPM method works best is that it rewards the better writers (or harder promoters of their own submissions), which generally speaking means you'll get higher quality content submissions to publish, while still offering lesser writers a chance to earn something as they build their skills.

Of course writers typically prefer an upfront payment for their work, but they often don't see how short sighted they're being in thinking that way.

So let's say Site "A" offers you $10 for your article upfront, that may be "decent" to you (many people write for far less at DP), but if Site "B" is offering $3 per 1000 page views for the life time of your article, then the potential earnings from that same article are much greater with Site "B". For a real life example, I've just checked one article on our site that pays authors and it's had over 24,000 views since July '08 - the article is just over 330 words. At a $3 CPM rate, that means this article could have earned $10 with Site "A" or over $72 and counting with Site "B"...

Of course, there are writers who earn nothing month after month because they submit low quality pieces that barely pass review for acceptance, and nobody reads them or links to them... for these writers I guess an upfront payment method would be better, but for anyone half-way decent at writing the sites which pay ongoing for article performance are ultimately the better deals in my opinion.

I know this is BHW and we all want the quick bucks for the least work, but for the OP who is starting his site, you should think about what will attract the best quality writers for you since that will determine what level of content you get to publish.

In my opinion, paying upfront is going to attract the lower quality writers who aren't capable or confident in their writing to earn from a performance based payout system.

On the other hand, if you pay for performance over the lifetime of articles you have to understand that means you could end up paying hundreds of dollars for individual articles. You should be paying out less CPM than you're earning, and if so this isn't a problem, but it's something to keep in mind.

Hope some of this is helpful.

I wouldn't bother with upfront payments outside of USA. 99% of your submissions will be from crap foreigners with broken english. CPM is the way to go and upfront for USA writers that write good, quality content.

Thestrangefruit

scb335 said:

The main reason I think the CPM method works best is that it rewards the better writers (or harder promoters of their own submissions), which generally speaking means you'll get higher quality content submissions to publish, while still offering lesser writers a chance to earn something as they build their skills.

Of course writers typically prefer an upfront payment for their work, but they often don't see how short sighted they're being in thinking that way.

So let's say Site "A" offers you $10 for your article upfront, that may be "decent" to you (many people write for far less at DP), but if Site "B" is offering $3 per 1000 page views for the life time of your article, then the potential earnings from that same article are much greater with Site "B". For a real life example, I've just checked one article on our site that pays authors and it's had over 24,000 views since July '08 - the article is just over 330 words. At a $3 CPM rate, that means this article could have earned $10 with Site "A" or over $72 and counting with Site "B"...

In my opinion, paying upfront is going to attract the lower quality writers who aren't capable or confident in their writing to earn from a performance based payout system.

On the other hand, if you pay for performance over the lifetime of articles you have to understand that means you could end up paying hundreds of dollars for individual articles. You should be paying out less CPM than you're earning, and if so this isn't a problem, but it's something to keep in mind.

Hope some of this is helpful.

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I agree with your opinion. If we could submit quality article, many people will read and impression will increase significantly. It pays much more than upfront payment. Could you tell me which sites that pay based on CPM performance ? Mostly I know other sites pay based on revenue sharing

queenrockz said:

I agree with your opinion. If we could submit quality article, many people will read and impression will increase significantly. It pays much more than upfront payment. Could you tell me which sites that pay based on CPM performance ? Mostly I know other sites pay based on revenue sharing

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Exactly. I actually funded the launch of my business back in the mid-90's with royalties I earned from some music compositions I had published, so I guess I look at content or article writing in the same way that I do other types of writing, like music/songwriting or fiction writing and etc., that one-off payments are unfair and even abusive to the writer over the long run when the publisher is going to continue earning off that content for years. I'd rather get an ongoing monthly check for a couple dollars that I know will be there every month for years than get a single payout that's equal to 10 or 20 times less in "lifespan value" from the work.

As for who pays based on CPM, I'm not going to list places because I've mentioned my involvement in one earlier and I don't want anyone to accuse me of shilling my own interests here. Even if I didn't include the one I'm involved in, people would assume that I had.

Use Google, there's quite a few out there, and not all are article-type sites like AC either (FYI, I'm not involved with AC in any way and since the rumors are that Yahoo is closing or changing AC soon I'd be careful about using them), but if you watch the blogging job boards you'll often find companies paying CPM for blog writing too. There's also some paying CPM on video and audio content too, and I think that market will continue to grow going forward.

And rev. share isn't necessarily a bad deal either, if the company is honest and transparent in their payout system. Then it's still going to boil down to the people who create the best stuff, and/or put a little effort into promoting their own material (bookmarking, blog linking and etc.) will earn the most return from their efforts.

What about letting people from different countries add content in their own language. Multilingual categories is something I have never seen before in an article site. I know some people use translators for their sites. Having the ability to get content that is grammatically correct for a specific language might be valuable to website owners and thus bring in some extra viewers/income.

scb335 said:

As for who pays based on CPM, I'm not going to list places because I've mentioned my involvement in one earlier and I don't want anyone to accuse me of shilling my own interests here. Even if I didn't include the one I'm involved in, people would assume that I had.

Use Google, there's quite a few out there, and not all are article-type sites like AC either (FYI, I'm not involved with AC in any way and since the rumors are that Yahoo is closing or changing AC soon I'd be careful about using them), but if you watch the blogging job boards you'll often find companies paying CPM for blog writing too. There's also some paying CPM on video and audio content too, and I think that market will continue to grow going forward.

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I can't get the idea what you said for not to mention the site.
Would you mind just telling one site ?