I appreciate the reply. We do pride ourselves on having a generous revenue share compared to some like Squidoo (which, I believe, offers 50% of profits = after costs/expenses; we offer 60% of revenue). It does work for a lot of people who are inclined to write a lot of one-off topical articles.

I can understand that AdSense, which is wholly contextually-driven, not working as well on a blog, where contextual nuance is a lot harder to decipher and match to ads.

But yes, there are plenty of users who are there to promote their own sites/blogs, which is fine with us, provided they write original content on our site (and don’t just trot out copied stuff, which is just plain lazy) and they don’t get overly aggressive with linking. I agree, for them, rev share might be just the icing on the cake rather than the main draw.

Best,
Jason

That sure got a quick rise out of the folks at HubPages! It is nice that they share some revenue but there is need for better models. They will probably start appearing as Web2.0 expands.

Ray Loesch’s last blog post..If I Die Before I Wake

I guess that reads a little harsh now that I look at it again. You’re right that your 60% is more generous than many rev share social sites out there.

And there’s no denying at all the search engine visibility HubPages offers. The rev share actually means nothing to me because I am there to use good content to generate more visibility.

That visibility going to sites of mine which have long given up on Adsense as a revenue model. Maybe you guys are thinking about other higher paying ways to bring in more income for the average user, but most people I work with are at HubPages for the visibility rather than the rev share.

My excitement over seeing a new model of rev share got the best of me and I could have easily picked on someone else in my example who’d end up being far more deserving of the comparison than HubPages.

You guys could end your rev share today and still have plenty of people building out the property for the sheer benefit of visibility alone. I must be responsible for sending at least 100 regular users over and I will continue to do so, but with the focus being on visibility and not making a killing on the rev share, even if it’s better than a lot of others out there.

In fact, we’re one of the most generous, and lots of our users are happy with the hundreds of dollars per month (or more) that they’re making on the site. What HubPages also offers is search engine visibility. A blogger trying to get the same traction from Google and Yahoo with articles posted on their new-to-the-world blog would be sorely disappointed, relatively speaking.

Jason Menayan
HubPages