San Francisco based HubPages, a revenue sharing community content destination, debuts a new look and ad yield technology today, building on a portal that is now attracting 2.4 million unique visitors a month.
We’ve previously covered HubPages here and here: the company took $2 million in funding from Hummer Winblad in August 2006 and on its initial launch in February 06 Michael Arrington asked the question as to whether HubPages was a better Squidoo.
The team behind the service has a particularly strong heritage: CEO Paul Edmondson was previously the Group Product Manager for MSN Entertainment, Jay Reitz was the Development Manager, and Paul Deeds was a developer in Windows Media Internet Services.
The new look follows extensive community consultation with over 14,000 authors across 20,000 hubs. On top of the visible changes that will be evident to the casual visitor, HubPages has included support for slide shows and multiple pictures, forums, and hub grouping tools that allow for easier navigation.
On the advertising side, HubPages officially launches what it’s calling “Behavioral Formatting Yield Optimization” technology. In layman’s terms it works out where advertising works best on each hub and places the ad unit to suit.
I spoke to Paul Edmondson ahead of the announcement. He told me that they currently have a handful of publishers making in excess of $1000 a month from their hub pages, with the top publisher currently making $1800/ month. Although by no means full time incomes, for the average writer these are good figures, decent pocket money for those looking to make money online from writing as a part time pursuit.
The newly announced “Behavioral Formatting Yield Optimization” technology has already resulted in an increase in advertising returns of up to 43% averaged across the board in testing to date.
HubPages currently utilizes advertising from Google Adsense, Commission Junction, Amazon and the beta of eBay’s Contextual Advertising units, with plans to roll out direct sponsorships of hubs in the foreseeable future.
There’s a lot to like about this service. The revenue sharing model is generous compared to others; a straight 50/50 60/40 split compared to Squidoo’s 50% of profits only, and publishers are paid direct by the advertiser: advertisements are rotated 1:1 with each publisher’s code and HubPages’ code. The question of Intellectual Property Rights is straight forward: publishers own the content and can do with it as they please.
Having worked in the blogging industry, both as a blogger and blog network owner, I can’t help but think that this is a better model than many blog networks out there currently offer. The flexibility and open nature of content creation at HubPages is a solid idea, the need to deal with payments is gone, and the positive word of mouth from those users making money from the service is bound to drive future growth.
Interesting concept. 50/50 revenue split is great strategy to get jumpstarted.
Revenue sharing with content owners seems quite hot these days. YouTube has just started sharing revenue with their top contributors, and there are few more excellent services such as http://www.triond.com, http://www.helium.com and http://www.asso...atedcontent.com.
Is altruism is disappearing from the user-generated-web? Maybe so. Nevertheless, compensating upon contributing sounds fair for me.
Revenue sharing is clearly no longer the wave of the future it is NOW.
http://www.ebizmba.com
Is Blogger getting revenue share for the stealing of its buttons? Just curious.
Having worked in the Blogging industry…..
When did this become an industry? and for How long?….
Starting with Pay Per Post and moving through to sites like Helium and now HubPages it seems like the age of consumer generated content is on the rise. The question is, is this an adjunct to the Web 2.0ish meta-filtering or is it superseding it?
I tend to believe that most people who blog or produce content online will continue to avoid the hassle of actually dealing with this profit sharing services until they can integrate them into their own blogs (I think PPP is doing something like this).
I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Here is a different look at HubPages (and all other “article” sites that are popping up like mushrooms) from somebody who runs a Social Bookmarking service (Simpy) – people writing those articles are encouraged to bookmark their articles all over the place, wherever they can. This is not bookmarking, this is self-promoting. I’ve talked to some people that promote their stuff on Simpy to try and understand their thinking. Some know what they are doing (polluting, kind of) and keep doing it anyway. Some are just clueless (work from home, write articles, sign-up for affiliate programs, revenue sharing of any kind and make a killing! right.). Amazing.
Question for everyone here:
How far is this self-promotion from spamming, when it comes to people “bookmarking” their own content to social bookmarking services? What’s your opinon? I’d love to know.
so with all these msft guys, why didn’t THEY use silverlight
also, calling the contributors “hubbers” is kinda…bleh. whose 5 year old kid came up with that incredibly creative name?
i think services like this will just get swamped by spammers – it’s like digg but without the self moderation aspect, unless i’m missing something here.
the seo on this site is pretty good. they get it. yeah they will have problems with spammers and crap content but with good seo and serps they should do well.
Sites like Helium are a bit of a red herring though … they say they reimburse their writers, but in reality many writers quit the site before making the $25 minimum payout. Why? Even writers who submit dozens of articles might not make that mark, given that many articles pay out only a few cents (it is all based on pageviews). 300 articles over 1 very busy week netted me just over $5 (which was subsequently denied to me because of a supposed violation of ToS).
dang, i never realized that hubpages would have so many unique visitors…
-jack
Yes its true… I have been a contributing writer for Hubpages for over a year now and I will have to admit as a freelance writer by profession. I enjoy the opportunity to share in a community of like minded authors, journalists and columnists.
Let’s consider – “A worker is worthy of his hire”. Like most bloggers I started out only interested in sharing my opinions, life, etc. Soon, I began to see that blogging, besides Adsense on Blogger, could generate a nice income. Why not get paid for the work you do anyway?
HubPages is just one of many traffic-generating, revenue-producers available today. For some, it can be the sole source of income. For others, it can be an additional source of income.
Jim DeSantis
HubPages Video Tutorials