For those who don’t remember – BlogBurst is a system that gives bloggers exposure in main stream media’s online sites. They sell your content to online newspapers which until this point ‘paid’ you with a byline and link back to your blog.
Now however they’ll be paying their Top 100 bloggers with a payment system that is quite different to anything I’ve seen before in the blogosphere. They are basing their rewards program upon a system like the PGA leaderboard where there is an amount that will be paid out each quarter which will be split between the top 100 in a prearranged way.
Position 1 will earn $1500, position 2 $1250, position 3 $1150 right down to positions 81-100 earning $50.
It’s an interesting model and will of course appeal to their top bloggers and put offside a lot of the smaller publishers.
The actual numbers seem smallish to me (remember they are paying these amounts for 3 months rather than monthly) but then again I’m not privy to knowing how much of a blogger’s content is actually used in that time. If it’s just a few articles then it’d be fine but I’m not sure I’d want to be seeing my content appear on other sites regularly for around $16 per day ($1500 divided by 90 days).
I can see some bloggers are already concerned about the new system on the blogburst blog announcement for a number of reasons including that payments are currently only open to US based bloggers (as a non US blogger I know this would be frustrating. While I understand the complexities of international rules around tax I’m sensing quite a bit of frustration from the non US blogosphere on these types of issues lately (exclusive beta tests, ad networks not counting non US traffic, publishers being removed from ad networks for non being US based etc).
It seems that they are not keeping aside money earned by non US publishers for future payments which would have been one way to satisfy their high performing overseas publishers.
Having said all that – this is the first version of BlogBurst’s rewards program and they do indicate that they are working on issues of non US publishers and will add more slots to the leader board as they grow so hopefully publishers will be fairly compensated in the future.
Hat Tip to Leigh and Michael for letting me know about this.
