Yesterday Vancouver's NowPublic made news for itself by selling out for an estimated $25 Million. The popular 'Crowd Powered Media' site has been a perennial Top 10 finisher on PEER 1's Canada Startup Index for the past year and was most recently #6 on last month's index.
Today a fellow Vancouver-based crowd-powered site Suite101.com made a little news of their own. The online magazine announced that freelance writer Lena Gott set a new monthly earnings record for articles published on Suite101.com with a paycheque of US $4,940.77 for the month of July. The most earned by a writer in a one-month period since Suite101.com launched in 1996.
“I can attribute much of my July earnings to my article on the Cash for Clunkers program,” said Gott, who normally earns around $2,000 a month for her articles on Suite101.com. “I strongly believe that writing in article clouds, or webs, and interlinking the related articles results in higher revenue. For the same amount of work, you get more page views because every article has the ability to drive page views to several related pieces, fulfilling the reader’s search for more information.”
Pretty impressive results for one month's work. If one freelance writer makes that kind of money in just one month, you have to assume that Suite101.com is on to a crowd-powered business model that makes sense. According to thier press release, here's how it all works:
Suite101.com earns revenue from advertising that appears on each article posted on Suite101.com. Writers earn a share of the revenue from the pages where their articles appear. This “dividend style” of payment continues as long as the articles appear on the site. Suite101 pays writers each month via PayPal. While there is no upper limit to a writer’s earnings, this model means there is also no guaranteed baseline - a fact that can dismay new writers first starting out but that can reward productive writers over time.
Congrats to Gott for raking in the revenue share and beating out Suite101.com's approximately 2,500 contributing writers for the #1 spot.
NowPublic is a participatory news network which mobilizes an army of reporters to cover the events that define our world. In twelve short months,... [more]
Suite101.com is an online magazine published by a network of over 2,000 freelance writers. As a company, we’re committed to creating... [more]
Rob Lewis
Rob is the President of Techvibes Media Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of Techvibes.com.
His diverse background includes stints in International Trade Finance, Web Development, and Enterprise Software and he is a graduate of the University of British Columbia, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and Simon Fraser University.
When not blogging on...[more]
