A Money Making Experiment - Feedback and Active Involvement Welcome

c.ford

Flyonthewall wrote: »

Moderated by humans? Do you realise how much work that is? What if your site grows and you end up with thousands of questions being asked? That is a lot of work!

Besides the content generated may make perfect sense but that doesn't mean that someone isn't using a script to do so. You would have to monitor the speed in which every member is posting to see whether it's likely a system is doing it. Even then someone may be able to type fast and could be posting short answers to questions and you wouldn't want to ban a legit member.

Bots are still use on many sites across the internet and people are always writing new scripts to get around blocks. Why wouldn't they? They stand to gain free money.

By the time the site gets up to strength I will have a team of moderators in place, just like on here.

Nothing is published without being a)Checked for plagiarism, b)checked for readability and c)checked for relevance and usefulness. If a post/comment passes all those checks, there is no harm in publishing it.

Bots are useless on heavily moderated sites. You tend to find that botters and spammers build up their own directories of sites that are worth hitting, and more importantly, those that are a waste of time.

If you moderate well enough, spammers go off and find easier targets.

Flyonthewall

c.ford wrote: »

While its very true that search engines, and more importantly people don't like copied content, it IS a fact of life and there is absolutely no harm in two people asking the same question in ten different places (it happens all the time and is a natural fact of internet life). John Smith on Yahoo Answers asks "How do I fix a red Raleigh Banana racing bike"? while on my site Jason Jones asks "How do I repair my red Raleigh racer bike?"

This happens all the time and its generally the sites with more authority who win that particualr battle. With age and time comes aithority and thats a LONG battle. But its one that everyone must fight, and its one that we will happily fight.

It's one thing people happening to ask the same question, it's entirely another asking people to rewrite the same questions and knowingly causing questions to be re-asked over and over, even though the person rewriting it may not actually want the answer.

To be honest, with everything being moderated by human eyes, its very easy to see the spammers at work. Its actually impossible for anyone with a "Contributor" role (the default role for normal members) to post a new question or comment without passing human moderation. We will know when someone is playing at silly beggars.

As i just posted, that is a lot of work. How many staff will you have monitoring the site?

The same question is not likely to be posted all that often on our site as we are building plagiarism plugins into the site that detect duplicate or near-duplicate content that will actually suggest to the author during editing that he go and look at the similar posts first before he asks a pointless question.

That goes against what you said for the email system. Unless you meant something different by it, but you said rewriting questions.

Strangely enough I was going to suggest a free Hotmail or Gmail account for this purpose, but this seems like a much healthier idea. Thanks! Its often simple things like this that get overlooked, so thanks for this, you've given me more food for thought!

No problem. I consider a hotmail or gmail account to be my personal account. I only use free services such as them.

Thats true they do. But we have human moderation and spamming will simply NOT be accepted.

So you'll stop people asking what you consider to be pointless questions that are spamming? Where do you draw the line?

"What should I name my cat?" An example question. Pointless spam? I may not have a cat, it's a quick simple question that came to mind and therefore spam.

Course I may have just bought a cat and be at a total loss as to what to name it.

Would you stop others asking that after the first question? Every cat is different, different members answering, different names may be suggested or suit better. Still the same question though. At what point does it become spam? Most members won't want to go through loads of cat name questions and you need to keep it fair for all members both asking and answering.

This made me chuckle, but honestly, we will be looking at ways of deterring users from doing that, such as a "downvote" button which will lose them points.

You get those that are vote happy or trolling. What happens if someone joins and votes loads down? Do they get banned for voting too many down, do comments get removed, those making the comments banned? Do you have a way to stop multiple accounts?

There will always be a slight loss of human capiutal with ventures like this, but usually its negligible. I used to use Neobux and then I realised I was the one at the bottom of the pile and that it was an utter waste of time. I'm hoping that by offering enough incentives and enough community policing we can help some people make a little money and have some fun doing so.

With Neobux you can get referrals and build up. It's the same for other sites, although Neobux is one that relies more on others to gain a decent amount.

Will you be offering a referral system? Your percentages were quite high for what the member gains for ads (which is great btw) so probably not so much to give on referrals without losing out but I'd say it is something expected by those who use other reward/paying sites.

Posting links is fine as long as they are not to dodgy neighbourhoods and as long as the links point to relevant content. We will be monitoring EVERYTHING that happens on the site though.

If you don't know the site the last thing you want is to click on it and get a virus. You save members but not yourself. Just a thought. You'd need a good anti-virus program.

Where do you stand on referral links? Say I post a link to Neobux. You used the site you know it's legit. Fair enough. What if I post a referral link to a site you don't know? Are you going to use the site to see if it's legit and pays out before allowing it to be posted? If not, what if the site isn't legit? People could end up joining scam sites. That would have an affect on your site because you'd be the source of the link.

The site is built and we are now beta testing it.

Some really useful input there, especially about site based email addresses. Might seem really logical to you lol but these are the little details that get so easily overlooked when you are building up a venture like this.

Thanks a lot for your time Flyonthewall, its really helpful.

No problem. Indeed. There are lots of little details involved with a site such as this and all are important lol.

Well once you get it up and running let me know. I'd be happy to join such a site.

I am curious though how you set up the payment system? Is it something you coded from scratch? Not expecting you to give away all your coding or anything, it's just I'm interested in designing/developing websites and there's little on such systems online. I understand if you don't want to answer this lol.

Don't think it's been mentioned, but on the topic of payments will payout be by Paypal? Is the site limited to certain countries? Is there any payout limit (e.g. earn at least £5) or restrictions (e.g. can only cash out at the end of the month)? Sorry for all the questions

Flyonthewall

c.ford wrote: »

By the time the site gets up to strength I will have a team of moderators in place, just like on here.

Nothing is published without being a)Checked for plagiarism, b)checked for readability and c)checked for relevance and usefulness. If a post/comment passes all those checks, there is no harm in publishing it.

Bots are useless on heavily moderated sites. You tend to find that botters and spammers build up their own directories of sites that are worth hitting, and more importantly, those that are a waste of time.

If you moderate well enough, spammers go off and find easier targets.

Every site has spammers/trolls sadly. When one goes another tries. Bots can do many things so I wouldn't just assume that heavy moderating will stop them. It may stop some, but others may not realise that it's a waste of time and try anyway and others may see it as a challenge to produce a working script.

I don't know how many questions/answers people will be able to post, but even with a small number of members there could be a lot of content to moderate. If someone posts in the middle of the night will someone be online to moderate it?

KazLA

It sounds like you have put a lot of thought, as well as time and effort into this new venture. It would be something I would be interested in getting involved with. Subscribing to this thread to read how things progress from here. Let me know if I can do anything to help. Good Luck!

c.ford

KazLA wrote: »

It sounds like you have put a lot of thought, as well as time and effort into this new venture. It would be something I would be interested in getting involved with. Subscribing to this thread to read how things progress from here. Let me know if I can do anything to help. Good Luck!

Thanks KazLA! If you think of any ideas or suggestions you would make to the project, it would be great if you could post it here.

c.ford

Flyonthewall wrote: »

It's one thing people happening to ask the same question, it's entirely another asking people to rewrite the same questions and knowingly causing questions to be re-asked over and over, even though the person rewriting it may not actually want the answer.

This literally would be a last resort. At the end of the day, some people are actually trying to earn a living doing microjobs online, like Amazon's Mechanical Turk for example. Sometimes that just isn't enough though. So I would like to let people try and earn some pennies for their work. When all is said and done, they are basically writing content for us, and I won't be paying them, it will all be publishers fees collected from Google.

So this facet of the experiment only exists as a last resort, and will encourage people to ask questions sensibly rather than spam questions regarding cats' names :P

Flyonthewall wrote: »

As i just posted, that is a lot of work. How many staff will you have monitoring the site?

We will employ as many as is needed. If it takes 10 then we will get 10. I already have a few contacts in the business who will point me towards reliable admins if necessary.

Flyonthewall wrote: »

That goes against what you said for the email system. Unless you meant something different by it, but you said rewriting questions.

As I mentioned a little earlier, the idea squirter is just a last resort and will hopefully reduce daft questions. The site is meant to be enjoyed, and should be seen as a community where we, the site owners want people to have fun and earn a few bob doing it, rather than the site simply existing as a reference with that sterile dictionary feel.

Flyonthewall wrote: »

So you'll stop people asking what you consider to be pointless questions that are spamming? Where do you draw the line?

"What should I name my cat?" An example question. Pointless spam? I may not have a cat, it's a quick simple question that came to mind and therefore spam.

Course I may have just bought a cat and be at a total loss as to what to name it.

Would you stop others asking that after the first question? Every cat is different, different members answering, different names may be suggested or suit better. Still the same question though. At what point does it become spam? Most members won't want to go through loads of cat name questions and you need to keep it fair for all members both asking and answering.

The ideas squirter should cut down on this kind of thing. However we have to operate with a little bit of trust and allow users a few strikes before we ban them. Community moderators will help combat pointless questions too. We will grant people a level of membership slightly higher than contributors, and allow them to veto questions. There will also be the usual warnings in place too, about heavy moderation, the need for usable questions, as well as polite advice from the mods about where to find answers to questions that don't really help anyone

Flyonthewall wrote: »

You get those that are vote happy or trolling. What happens if someone joins and votes loads down? Do they get banned for voting too many down, do comments get removed, those making the comments banned? Do you have a way to stop multiple accounts?

We can monitor IP addresses to a certain extent, however with the evolution of private proxies it becomes difficult to know the difference between real user accounts and fake accounts (at a base level). However, as with all community sites, other members will quickly oust the trollers as they are the ones who stand to lose income through trolling or spamming activities.

Flyonthewall wrote: »

With Neobux you can get referrals and build up. It's the same for other sites, although Neobux is one that relies more on others to gain a decent amount.

Will you be offering a referral system? Your percentages were quite high for what the member gains for ads (which is great btw) so probably not so much to give on referrals without losing out but I'd say it is something expected by those who use other reward/paying sites.

The percentages are set high because people are not so naive to believe that 1000 clicks at 25% does not represent a substantial income. People know what they are doing and a revenue share needs to be set high so that people are willing to risk their time and effort into a venture that relies largely on the performance of their material in the SERPs.

Flyonthewall wrote: »

If you don't know the site the last thing you want is to click on it and get a virus. You save members but not yourself. Just a thought. You'd need a good anti-virus program.

Security is something I am VERY picky about. Our site is very well protected.

Flyonthewall wrote: »

Where do you stand on referral links? Say I post a link to Neobux. You used the site you know it's legit. Fair enough. What if I post a referral link to a site you don't know? Are you going to use the site to see if it's legit and pays out before allowing it to be posted? If not, what if the site isn't legit? People could end up joining scam sites. That would have an affect on your site because you'd be the source of the link.

We have discussed referral systems and it may be that we will introduce that later on as a deal sweetener if new members are teetering on the edge of joining and are changing their mind because they believe the risk of revshare is not worth it.

Edit: Sorry I misunderstood the context. We have software that will set all external links to "NOFOLLOW". This means that search engines will see the links as a dead end and will not follow them. This will also mean we can remove the nofollow attribute from existing links, should we want to be associated with the sites they point to (usually highly relevant sites with good authority levels in the SERPs).

Flyonthewall wrote: »

Well once you get it up and running let me know. I'd be happy to join such a site.

I am curious though how you set up the payment system? Is it something you coded from scratch? Not expecting you to give away all your coding or anything, it's just I'm interested in designing/developing websites and there's little on such systems online. I understand if you don't want to answer this lol.

The payment system? If you mean our banking innards I can't really reveal that, but what I will say is that the solution was out of the box and plugged straight in so it wasn't anything complex.

Flyonthewall wrote: »

Don't think it's been mentioned, but on the topic of payments will payout be by Paypal? Is the site limited to certain countries? Is there any payout limit (e.g. earn at least £5) or restrictions (e.g. can only cash out at the end of the month)? Sorry for all the questions

Initially, income will only be generated by advertising fees. So cashing out is completely Google's jurisdiction. I believe there is a threshold control in Adsense that allows zero minimums.

The whole idea of the site though is to have fun while you earn, have a good conversation and even make new friends. We have built in SocNet controls so connecting with your FB friends will be very easy.

Thanks for all your input Flyonthewall, it's helped us a great deal to have someone stress-test our strategy.

Flyonthewall

c.ford wrote: »

This literally would be a last resort. At the end of the day, some people are actually trying to earn a living doing microjobs online, like Amazon's Mechanical Turk for example. Sometimes that just isn't enough though. So I would like to let people try and earn some pennies for their work. When all is said and done, they are basically writing content for us, and I won't be paying them, it will all be publishers fees collected from Google.

So this facet of the experiment only exists as a last resort, and will encourage people to ask questions sensibly rather than spam questions regarding cats' names :P

Indeed. Course it may take time for any question to gain even 1p. 75% (as you said before) is a very nice percentage but 75% of 1p...that reason alone could lead to spam questions to start with. People attempting to find what makes them a few pence. While I understand how the ads and google work many don't.

Personally I don't see that as any type of job/work. It's a bit of a grey area as far as earning online goes (for similar sites, not actual businesses), but I'd class as it as a reward for being a part of the site. Once you start saying work or anything to do with making a living online it becomes something more than questions and answers and people will question how legit it is (I mean, people will do that anyway but job/work means more than pennies to most so they'll be wondering how they could possibly get so much that it becomes work).

We will employ as many as is needed. If it takes 10 then we will get 10. I already have a few contacts in the business who will point me towards reliable admins if necessary.

I'm here if you want to employ me If you have 100 members asking 10 questions each a day and 50 of them answer at least 5 of the questions by the other 100, that's a lot of comments to be moderated daily and only a very small number of members. The questions could be asked any time of day or night. It could grow quite quickly too. For some a quick glance at the content may be fine but others could take longer.

Look at Yahoo Answers for example. Many questions have members who write amazingly long answers and give sources too. They would take far longer to moderate. I know this is more to the business side than the actual site, but last thing you want is to be paying staff more than you're making (afterall, you are taking 25% of what will often be a matter of pence and you have to keep the site running).

It's good that you're willing to employ people and keep standards high. You may find later on you need a system to do the basics though.

As I mentioned a little earlier, the idea squirter is just a last resort and will hopefully reduce daft questions. The site is meant to be enjoyed, and should be seen as a community where we, the site owners want people to have fun and earn a few bob doing it, rather than the site simply existing as a reference with that sterile dictionary feel.

Fair enough. I like the idea of the community, helping/getting answers and earning. It's what will get you loyal happy members.

The ideas squirter should cut down on this kind of thing. However we have to operate with a little bit of trust and allow users a few strikes before we ban them. Community moderators will help combat pointless questions too. We will grant people a level of membership slightly higher than contributors, and allow them to veto questions. There will also be the usual warnings in place too, about heavy moderation, the need for usable questions, as well as polite advice from the mods about where to find answers to questions that don't really help anyone

Sounds good.

I hope you have a good help page listing all the rules (perhaps tips/rules on the page for asking questions), what the site's about, how it works etc. Not that everyone reads them, it just annoys me when sites have really rubbish help pages and expect people to know everything

We can monitor IP addresses to a certain extent, however with the evolution of private proxies it becomes difficult to know the difference between real user accounts and fake accounts (at a base level). However, as with all community sites, other members will quickly oust the trollers as they are the ones who stand to lose income through trolling or spamming activities.

Yeah, sadly there is no way to stop people creating multiple/fake accounts ecept monitoring members. A lot of similar sites do say one account per household or no multiple accounts though.

The percentages are set high because people are not so naive to believe that 1000 clicks at 25% does not represent a substantial income. People know what they are doing and a revenue share needs to be set high so that people are willing to risk their time and effort into a venture that relies largely on the performance of their material in the SERPs.

Many sites don't give away the percentage they give and most won't have a clue how much is made from ads. More so, many don't realise money can even be made from ads. Some know what they're doing, especially regarding referrals, and they'll play the system well.

Security is something I am VERY picky about. Our site is very well protected.

Glad to hear it.

We have discussed referral systems and it may be that we will introduce that later on as a deal sweetener if new members are teetering on the edge of joining and are changing their mind because they believe the risk of revshare is not worth it.

Cool.

Edit: Sorry I misunderstood the context. We have software that will set all external links to "NOFOLLOW". This means that search engines will see the links as a dead end and will not follow them. This will also mean we can remove the nofollow attribute from existing links, should we want to be associated with the sites they point to (usually highly relevant sites with good authority levels in the SERPs).

I see. Fair enough as far as search engines go. However, what about the members? They see a link on your site, join, find it's a scam and who's to blame? You because that's where they found about it.

Now I personally like when I can link someone to a site I know is legit. On the other hand, it drives me mad when I see people linking to sites that are clearly scams lol. I suppose a report link/answer may help control that to a certain point.

The payment system? If you mean our banking innards I can't really reveal that, but what I will say is that the solution was out of the box and plugged straight in so it wasn't anything complex.

Not the banking side, just the way in which you link what is earnt to each member. So basically when money is earnt how is that worked out and displayed to each member.

Initially, income will only be generated by advertising fees. So cashing out is completely Google's jurisdiction. I believe there is a threshold control in Adsense that allows zero minimums.

I see. From what I know of my account, Google have a minimum amount for cashing out (don't know if there's any way to change it or whatever) but as that amount is going to various members no member would know if that amount has been reached, they can only go by their own earnings. Although even with Google in control of that, that doesn't stop you adding minimums/restrictions if it works best for you.

The whole idea of the site though is to have fun while you earn, have a good conversation and even make new friends. We have built in SocNet controls so connecting with your FB friends will be very easy.

Thanks for all your input Flyonthewall, it's helped us a great deal to have someone stress-test our strategy.

No problem. I actually had a very similar idea myself a while back but the reward side of it was different :rotfl: It wouldn't be possible for me to go ahead with anything like that myself though (so don't worry! No competition lol). When I read that first post all my previous thoughts and issues came flooding back to me

System

c.ford wrote: »

Thanks Browntoa! As I said, I have asked the forum team what to do as it seems a little unclear due to the fact that Swagbucks and Clixxsense links etc are mentioned all the time. Maybe they are commercial partners, I don't know, but either way I've been polite, I'm not a spammer and I will wait to see what they say.

As I don't stand to make money from anyone as a result of sales or anything like that, (in fact I'm trying to help others make money which I figure is part of what you guys do here on MSE), I'm hoping I won't be seen as a spammer.

Anyway, I've been a good boy lol

The post on Clixsense here, 'Clixsense 2014' is run by myself and I have no ownership of Clixsense. There are lots of threads like that, where members share advice and help one another earn money, none of us own those sites. The threads also contain no referral links.

googler

Why would anyone ask a question at this site in preference to established, possibly topic-specific forums ... ? Or as opposed to googling it?

Flyonthewall

googler wrote: »

Why would anyone ask a question at this site in preference to established, possibly topic-specific forums ... ? Or as opposed to googling it?

Because they can hopefully make money? For the community? Because despite many sites offering the same thing there's always people who look elsewhere or head to the first site they think of (which could be this site with some decent marketing)?

New forums appear all the time. Sure, many get no members or very few, but others do well despite many other forums offering the same.

As for googling it, it seems the obvious answer but it's surprising how many people don't think to do that. This forum alone proves that. Just look at the questions asked here. Most could be found by a quick google search yet still this forum does very well.