Just two weeks after launch, ViewsHound, the crowd-sourced news site with daily prizes, has introduced a revenue share option for contributors.
Instead of just being in with a chance of winning a part of the site’s daily prize fund for the best articles, photos and cartoons contributed, in a move similar to UK competitor Blottr, users can now get a share of advertising revenue – I just hope they didn’t take my advice.
That said, while ViewsHound is billing the feature as a 50/50 split, it’s not ad-revenue share quite in the way that we know it. Contributors won’t get a 50% share of revenue garnered through ads on the site sold by ViewsHound itself but will be able to run their own Google Adsense against content that they publish. The 50% comes into play in the way in which pages are rendered, with every other page view displaying the user’s ads versus those sold by ViewsHound.
However, should the site take off, it’s likely that even low cost CPM ads from a generic ad network would dwarf the income generated through Adsense, although any type of revenue share is better than none.
Commenting on the feature, Ian Howlett, Publisha founder and editor in chief (the company behind ViewsHound), says: “viewing figures are good, with over 11,000 unique visitors since launch, so whilst it’s still early days, we should see good growth in ad revenues”.
It is early days indeed.