Newsvine User Payout System

I recently revisited Newsvine, another social news site, as I have been meaning to do for awhile now since I was intrigued by their system of giving contributers a portion of the ad revenue for popular story submissions. While it's pretty simple how it works, I couldn't find any real numbers of what users were getting. Well, here is a link to the official Newsvine Blog that shows the top earner received $414.27 for August '06.

A few interesting comments on the post hinted at a rough calculation by one submitter as about $.04/vote on his seeds/articles, and another (one of the top tech submitters) claiming he wasn't yet into 3-figures. But the norm was $1.10 here, and $3.50 there.

Of course, this is almost a couple months old, and I don't know if their model for this is still solely, "page views times ad revenue per page view." But anyway, it's pretty clear you can't go into it motivated by the returns. It does make me wonder though, what these other sites that claim to pay you for your blogging/submissions pay their submitters. I'm talking of those that don't fit the idealist role like Newsvine, but are more user-revenue based. Maybe I'll look into that in the future.

I guess I have to say it's a cool new way to approach community news sites, and I could see myself getting a little thrill out of watching my meager gains, and that feeling of getting a direct response to my time/energy.