Thisisby.us: Make Money Writing for this Revenue Sharing Website
thisisby.us is a website that allows you to make money by writing and submitting your articles within a community. Some articles on the website were recently on the Reddit frontpage, which is where I first came to know of them.
Operating via a revenue-share model, thisisby.us will give a portion of whatever revenue they earn to the writers, commenters and affiliates who refer new users to their website.
Some sort of a social writing community, thisisby.us covers a variety of topics such as news, humor, politics, business and technology. Content is ranked by reader votes and page views and the top articles are displayed on the site’s frontpage.
This article reviews thisisby.us from both a user and entrepreneurial perspective and includes some tips on how you can generate some income through their website.
How do I Make Money with thisisby.us?
50% of the advertising revenue goes to the writers who submit articles to their website. 10% of the revenue goes to commenters and affiliates stand to earn 5% of whatever their referred friends’ posts earn.
The actual amount of money you earn for your article depends on a ‘Goodness’ rating, which is a combination of the number of views as well as the total number of votes in the last 24 hours.
For example, say the site earns $40 in a day. $20 of that money goes to the writers. If you write one post and it earns 250 goodness that day, and all the posts together earn 1000 goodness that day, then you earn $5.
Alternatively you can make a smaller amount of money by commenting and voting for articles and referring friends who write. Payment will be made at the end of each month by a personal check after you’ve reached a balance of $25 or more.
Getting People to Read your Articles
Thisisby.us is rather explicit on how you can get people to view your articles. According to their FAQ, you are encouraged to use social news and bookmarking websites to get more pageviews for your posts, which will eventually help you to make more money.
Social voting/bookmarking buttons are also placed prominently on the right sidebar next to each article to encourage viewers to support the writer by voting or submitting the article on specific social sites. I believe these on-site buttons do contribute in some way to the overall success of several articles recently.
The process is relatively easy. Sign up for an account with thisisby.us and some major social websites. Write a post and then promote it by submitting it to places like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. This will easily get some traffic to your website, which will increase your overall share of the ad revenue.
Analyzing Their Business Model
thisisby.us uses a smart business model which comprises of user generated content and marketing. They don’t need to do much work because all the registered users are producing all the content for their website.
This allows them to pull in search engine visitors as more content-rich webpages are indexed. Users will also promote the site on their behalf because they have an incentive to do so: more pageviews and referred users = more money.
I’ve seen similar revenue sharing websites like thisisby.us in the past but this is the first site that focuses heavily on the use of social media to promote their content.
It’s a good idea although this might eventually backfire especially when readers start to over promote the site on social news sites like Digg or Reddit.
A quick look shows that they are monetizing through Amazon affiliate ads, BlogAds and RMX Direct. I’m not sure why they aren’t running Google Adsense or YPN because contextuals are the fastest and easiest way for them to get some steady income.
What I Think is the Best Way to Use thisisby.us
If you’re going to drive social media traffic anywhere, drive it to your site. I see no point in helping someone else grow their site in return for a tiny amount of money.
All the valuable social media traffic can expand your own audience size and eventually help you to make an eventual substantial amount of money.
Why share revenue when you can put up ads on your site and take 100% of the earnings? Why send someone to register on another site when you can send some one to sign up for your own newsletter, email list or blog feed?
Having said there, there are still some ways you can use thisisby.us.
- Drive referral traffic to your site. As the community grows, thisisby.us can be used as a method to drive traffic to your site. I’m not sure how many would visit your website from your article but this is something that can be tested. Use their site to grow your site, while making some money at the same time.
- Get deep links. Put up some posts and include some anchor links to specific pages on your website. Don’t abuse this function and try to include useful links that are relevant to your article topic. I’m surprised to see that not many users link out.. perhaps its because they don’t have a site of their own.
- Republish articles. thisisby.us allows you to republish articles that you’ve written on your blog or elsewhere. This is something you should take advantage of if you run several blogs and don’t have time to write new articles. You can make minor edits to your original articles or include an excerpted version for thisisby.us
User Content Policy and Ad Payments
It might be useful to take into account strict terms and conditions for user content and ad payments. I believe not everyone actually reads this section so I’m going to republish some important parts here:
By posting, uploading, or otherwise transmitted user content to the Site, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, and fully sublicensable and transferable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, distribute, publish, create derivative works from and publicly display and perform such User Content in any media.
We reserve the right to add, remove, modify, rename, move, delete, or discontinue the subdomain or any material or user content therein at any time in our sole discretion. We further reserve the right to change or discontinue the payment of earnings at any time. Your continued use of our site and maintenance of an account with us after any such change will constitute your acceptance of the new terms.
I’ve did actually plan to create a site like thisisby.us a few months ago but shelved the idea because I was too occupied with work on other projects.
I do think these sort of community/user-generated sites are much more profitable for the owner than the user and perhaps I might be experimenting with this business model in the near future.
If they didn’t promote zango it would be better. All i see is a zango ad on there.
“It’s a good idea although this might eventually backfire especially when readers start to over promote the site on social news sites like Digg or Reddit.”
I don’t follow. Is there really such a thing as getting overpromoted on a social news site? Isn’t it better to have as many visitors as possible, regardless of whether they come from social news sites or elsewhere?
nice, thanks for helping us discover the site, with a domain like that i doubt i personally would have stumbled on it. I agree with you on a revenue sharing business model especially in the light of user created content. My site practices user genrated content, the incentive users have is to share experience through capturing pictures of events they wish others could have enjoyed with them, this in a way is satisfying and provides my users utility and keeps them coming back. Money is one big driver so imagine the incentive it creates!
I agree with the thought that your efforts should be concentrated on building your own site rather than someone else’s. I think it’s a good idea though, especially for newer bloggers and site owners, to use services like this to get noticed and get some links. Definitely seems useful, just not a primary source of income.
Nice info about this site. I will definitly will try to earn some money there. This will be another couple of dollars to my online earnings
It’s an interesting idea Maki and I’ve seen similar a few times before. I’ve always questioned why someone would give away content for percentage of revenue when they could publish the content themselves for 100% of the revenue.
The obvious benefit is that a site like Thisisby.us gets marketed by everyone who participates and you stand a greater chance of getting your content seen.
I’m not crazy about those two paragraphs you pulled from the TOS. That’s a lot of rights you’re signing away by submitting. You’re giving away more than if you were paid by a big name magazine for what would likely be more money. And the right to change or discontinue payment of earnings at any time raises some big distrust flags.
It sounds like an interesting idea. I just signed up for it..
Thanks for writing an honest review, Maki.
Just wondering: would there be any issues with duplicate content if we were to republish articles from our own site?
Nice review and nice profit sharing idea for the sharing profit website. However, does this share profit website allow duplicate content and republish on their site.
I don’t know that one can over promote. There is so much defamation out there that everyone on the internet needs to control their identity.
Very informative… I was kind of wondering about this and wasn’t sure if it would be worth my time to contribute to thisisby.us. Those are good ideas for how to use the site to benefit your own, though.
Hi
This is my first comment. I usually read your feed and never comment, but this time I have to do it.
I’m designing a “revenue sharing website” of my own (not in English), but I have a big problem: Adsense. I’m afraid to put it on the website because dishonest people may click too much and end up terminating my account. How should I protect myself against that?
I’ve seen a lot of software that tracks clicks, but what I need is something to prevent people from clicking 3, 4 ,5 times in like 30 seconds.
I would appreciate any help. Otherwise I will monetizing it with other ad networks that wouldn’t be as profitable as Adsense.
Thanks
Skellie,
As you probably know, republishing articles can sometimes lead to duplicate content issues. I would suggest making a few edits to the article in order to make sure that its not entirely the same. If your original article has links pointing to me and ranks well, there shouldn’t be too much problem. You can include a link to the original article within the thisisby.us article as well.. as that may help in some way.
Rosinha, I’m not aware of any software that will prevent people from clicking your ads too quickly. Click fraud is a risk that all webmasters face when using contextual ads and it is largely unavoidable. Running a click/ad tracker/logger should be sufficient IMO.
Hope this helps. ^_^