My 2 DVC on the change in payment based on page views. I haven't worked through the math, but it looks like if I write 1000 words and no one ever reads it, I would get 0.75 share for it. Correct? If a lot of people read my work, then I get 1.25 shares. It strikes me as a decent compromise between rewarding the writing itself (unconditionally) and rewarding writing that many others like.
Something that needs to be considered. Rewarding by page views is also rewarding based on author's ability to market his or her work. Authors who do not market well for whatever reason would lose on the page views unless they arrange to have others do the marketing. Authors who market well will be rewarded by extra shares regardless of whether or not their writing is objectively better. This isn't necessarily bad, just something to be aware of. 3/5 of the potential earnings are unaffected by this.
The one thing I would like to have for sure is that when this formula kicks in, that our earnings are shown on the various files that we already use to determine this. So, if I'm getting .75 share for something, I'd like that to be indicated so that I can plan to write more or market harder during that round. I can work with this as long as I know what to expect.
thanks!
There's an issue with this that goes deeper. Only a few days worth of marketing will count. I can throw traffic at the site at any point through my various sources, but because it's an external site I won't be able to sustain that. For example, I'd have no issue tossing out 10k+ views (LEGITIMATE TRAFFIC funneled from my news sites) over a period of a day or two, but after that it would drop off. So the marketing is worthless to me unless I were to hit it right at the perfect time. Otherwise I'd be funneling people over, getting absolutely nothing for it, and if it wasn't in that 4-day period where traffic counts, it'd have all been a waste of effort.
Furthermore, only 80k words count regardless, and there are a couple more things to point out to you:
1) The 0.75-1.25 is only for this round. Starting next round it's 0.5-1.5.
2) You can only do 80k words. So essentially your earnings, should you do all 80k, would be anywhere from 40-120 shares starting in the next round. Even if you wrote 500000 million words, you would still be bound to the same thing since it's still only going to count the 80k.
My marketing ability alone would be borderline exploitative with this new system, and that is one reason why I hate it. I have no problems with creating surges of traffic by carefully picking topics and marketing them myself, but those surges are short-lasted. Any long-term marketing I have to do is focused on keeping all of my sites in the ranking #1 and #2 in Google. I really don't like basically having to choose whether I want to sustain my own site or sustain another site in the hopes that I *might* be rewarded on the second; I much prefer guarantees. Furthermore, there are many methods where this could be exploited with non-legitimate traffic, and to the poster that brought up using Google Analytics... those are easily fooled.
Regardless, I'm sticking it out for this round and I will see whether or not it's worth continuing with its latest changes. If nothing else, I'll calm down on the writing and marketing (I've marketed the hell out of the main page since I joined the project, :p) and treat it as more of a side project.
