I hate it when you forget to lock the catflap and a skunk creeps in. I leave our Facebook group page alone for 24 hours and two uninvited puffs for new social-networking sites (what, more?) sneak on.
The first was slapped on our wall for Yuwie.com, and announced in breathless terms that Yuwie would pay you (”Yes, YOU, little human”) for using their site. MySpace make $20 million dollars, the doubtless disinterested poster informed us, “get your slice of the pie!” Er, right. Yuwie’s site hits you right off with spinning banners, annoying videos with no volume controls and interstitial ads that even interrupt the terms and conditions page. Someone out there even paid to sponsor the T&Cs! The terms and conditions do, however, clarify the payment details which is calculated by page views and referrals in a kind of opaque league table. And true to the best traditions of pyramid sales, they decline to commit to a concrete amount. However they provide an “indicative” set of numbers – if you generate 59,000 referrals who each generate 1000 pages of traffic, you could earn (hold your breath) $9000 a month. Whoo!
That’s in return for generating 59,000,000 page views where all page views lasting less than 3 seconds are discounted. Oh, don’t forget that in the terms and conditions, Yuwie.com decline to guarantee any payment whatsoever – you get paid whatever they happen feel to like on the day.
So how do you go about generating 59 million page views? As Simon Smith comments on One Degree, you spam your friends. A lot.
Is this a sound business model? Well, for Yuwie, maybe, but the rest of us are probably better off with Amway (joke!). Google “Yuwie” and you find yourself tumbling into that strange netherworld of ‘monetized’ blogs, a kind of online equivalent to that Gaulish town in the Asterix comics inhabited entirely by blacksmiths and woodsellers. (One blogger owned up to making 66 cents on Yuwie in their first month). As Josh Lowenshon comments, it’s economically unsustainable.
The other site? Please, another day.
Filed under: Yuwie, social media | Tagged: advertising, business, social networking, Yuwie
Hi Michael, thanks for the link, even though you’re not in favor of Yuwie. FYI, the second month’s earnings were $2.15…still trivial, but growing.
I’m undecided yet on whether Yuwie will sustain itself in the long run. Adding interstitial ads was a big mistake, and will drive some members away. They’re also not effective for advertisers, so were a bad bet all around.
As far as spamming your friends, I’ll grant that many Yuwie members aren’t principled in how they look for referrals. My own referrals come primarily from search engine traffic to a Squidoo page, and blog posts about earnings. So it’s possible to participate in Yuwie without spamming…perhaps rare, but possible.
Many Yuwie members are still in that “gold rush” mentality, too, and haven’t gotten down to the business of socializing, which is what will make or break the site. A bunch of people generating page views doesn’t make a social networking site.
Time will tell. I enjoyed your post, it’s good to hear all sides of an issue.
Hey Jay – thanks for the balanced response! I think Yuwie really faces one insurmountable problem – it doesn’t (outside of the money making proposition) offer anything different in terms of a networking experience unless your main goal is driving traffic. And most users of social networks actually use them to, well, network socially. In a crowded space, I just don’t see it…
[Edit from Michael, blog owner: I wondered whether to spam the below comment (it is, after all, shameless self-promotion by another Yuwie-alike) but it illustrates some of my points about this whole strange cottage industry quite nicely]
Yuwie is OK if you accept the fact that you’re going to be generating MASSIVE page views (dollars) for the company in return for a few pennies of advertising revenue.
For those of you that have decided to forego math, you’d earn an astonishing $.00005 per referral. There are other more viable programs that base their “tiered” marketing approach on something more substantial, DOLLARS.
Instead of spamming your friends, family, and colleagues to death for a site that actually offers less features and less functionality than MySpace, look around for more lucrative opportunities.
Here’s the problem I have with Yuwie, you’re basically forced to be an affiliate, and you’re forced into someone else’s downline the minute you join. Also, regardless of what level you come in, you should be able to earn just as much as anyone else.
Enter PopVent.com
Enjoy the site, enjoy the tons of features, and IF you’d like, sign up to be a Revenue Partner, and start earning residuals through the multi-tiered affiliate program.
It’s free and there’s nothing to lose, and much to gain.
There’s my two cents
this is exactly the way I looked at it from the time i signed up on Yuwie and could see its unsustainable and just how trivial the whole earnings would end up being. Its just an unsurmountable task to be able to achieve the ranking to earn a so called decent payout.
And as mentioned by someone prior, Yuwie seems to be filled with unscrupulous mobs of people who are bent at brow beating and spamming the mailboxes and pages of nearly everybody they possibly can.
I guess that’s why the spam filter button and the ignore button on my messaging and chat service have become such good friends of mine.
I was nearly drawn down into following the path of the spammers and opted against it . . . . cos its just plain simple, if you gotta spam to get people to join up, it just sucks.
Either way, I’ll hang around there along with all the other social networking sites I hang in and chuckle to myself as i see the pointless wonders scrabbling around willy nilly adding every person they see as a “friend” just so they can barely make 10c in a month.
That’s my way of killing the spare time that I have. LOL