Remembering Newsvine.com - Pay for Blogging Site

Does anyone else remember Newsvine?  The website paid people to blog using advertising as it's source for revenue.  There are still active users there, but in the early days there was much excitement about this venture and it's potential.  It was a small enough community you learned who was who and much of the site was dedicated to politics, as many people love to debate about their political views.  The site is still alive and I log in from time to time and have political arguments with the few members of the old community.

                                                    

They did a couple of things really well, in their marketing they promised less and delivered more!  They set expectations really low, that one could earn a few cents from each blog post.  Some of us gained a lot more, because we exceeded expectations we felt like we were winning instead of losing.  They let the drama rage on and created communities.  The Drama lovers migrated to the drama and those who enjoyed calm debates when to their corners.  They built a really strong sense of pride in the community and the founders often interacted with the end-users in fun.  They pumped up how much they loved what they built and made us all feel proud  to be a part of the community.  The built a culture of drama, but with pride.  

 Instead of a trending the front page showed "popular" links.  The payouts were also listed, but in a game like fashion, which were presented as stats in a fun way. (you had to click to see them)

 these are not exact, pulled from memory

Top Winners Today! - Highest Earners

  Dying on the Vine.  Articles with little activity

 Entertaining the Most Trolls  - Articles with the most comments

This Month's Highest Earners

Other funny stats

Another idea they implemented which might be good here, users had a little vine icon on their home page and that vine started without leaves (bare).  You earned leaves by doing different tasks.  Posted x number of posts, gave you the first leaf.  You got another if you were stand out in the community.  If I remember correctly there were about 6 leaves and some of them difficult to earn.  Those of us who had the full "vine" were the envy of those still earning it.

The site was monetized by advertising and users were paid by the traffic our homepage provided.  A users payment was based on how many people saw your url - www.newsvine.com/whatsup  (regardless if they were members or not, and that was not my name there) When people clicked on an article you wrote, commented on it or liked it you received credit for that page refresh.  (eye-balls on ads)  

Newsvine was eventually purchased by MSNBC for an undisclosed amount.  After the site was aquired the friendlinss and community feelings were lost and most left.  They replaced their rewards system with Adsense for those who were "grandfathered in".  Although most people there no longer earn some are still there blogging.  (mostly about politics)

Although our model is different - I think we could have a little more fun with the site.  Social media is fun.  It might be nice to move the financial information to it's own link and show..  Winners and loser in a different way.  Anyway, my goal is to bring a story of a successful blog, social media site, to keep us thinking, growing and focusing on gathering users.  Where there are people, currency will follow.

                                                      

The founders of Newsvine met their goals, they were acquired and founders and employees alike were rewarded financially.    They built a strong community of people and a revenue source.  I know SteemIt isn't just a business, it is POW for a Crypto-Currency, but anyone from Marketing, Business, or even currency will tell you, the more people you have the more value you have.

https://www.newsvine.com/

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