Read... The... Fucking... Documents!
My last post about ad revenue sharing on InLEO got a lot of flak and blowback yesterday. People in the comments telling me it doesn't work the way I'm representing; that users have to have LEO powered up in order to get a piece of the revenue, and even worse that the "100% content-creator sharing" is actually just distributed to stake holders.
fud is fud
Not gonna lie, seeing all that chatter made me panic because... you know I didn't actually look up exactly how it worked. I just blindly advertised it the way it was marketed at face value headline. Certainly not the best strategy here in crypto land. Perhaps I should have done my homework! In this post I'll be revisiting the topic with more nuanced glasses and going over everything I missed.
Khal is understandably very frustrated because he puts this stuff out there and nobody reads it and then everyone is just running around making stuff up based on half truths and filling in the gaps with intuition. This creates a lot of confusion and he ends up answering the same question over and over again in Discord even though it's all in the posted documents. Classic crypto. Wen moon?
Google Adsense
Starting at the very beginning, LEO was using some kind of off-brand advertiser at first but they were jerking Khal around and shortchanging the deal. He's since moved it over to Google, which is fine for now. However, the plan is to eventually create a custom community-run implementation.
Then a Poll is run on Threads and the community votes to approve or disprove the Ad proposal. If approved, then the ad runs immediately after the Poll closes with the specified budget, timeframe and ad placement locations.
Even though mentioning the roadmap somewhat clutters this post I couldn't help but quote this because it's actually really cool functionality. How many platforms let their users vote on which ads to allow and which ones to veto? As far as I know the answer is zero (and it still is because this doesn't exist yet).
There are two ways to earn ad revenue from INLEO:
- Be an Active LEO POWER holder
- Create Evergreen Blog Posts From Inleo.io
So essentially this 1000 LEO that I got and bragged about is indeed my cut from being a massive stakeholder. My reward for generating actual traffic appears to be 0.007 LEO; so basically nothing. I haven't yet found out which accounts are making the actual rewards for generating network traffic. Probably very few if any at the moment because getting eyeballs from the outside is no easy feat.
The minimum to receive a distribution is 500 LEO POWER.
Considering the dollar value of 500 LEO these days ($25) this is currently more than fair. I assume this applies to both the stakeholder share and the evergreen share to prevent various forms of Sybil attack and reduce the number of accounts that need to be tracked and distributed to.
The minimum threshhold for traffic is at least 200 views per month (currently - we can tweak this as needed).
Dusted
There are a couple of different ways to get disqualified from revenue sharing. The first is to be an 'inactive' account. The definition of 'inactive' is dynamic and is graded on a curve to avoid gaming the system with bots and whatnot. However, it takes very little to qualify as active. Maybe one post and a couple comments/threads at most every month. It's a low bar.
Authors earn 80% of the ad revenue generated from views on their content every single month. The other 20% goes to the LEO POWER-based Ad Revenue pool to support the curators who support the creators.
So if your article gets 1,000 views in a month, then you will receive 80% of the ad revenue that those 1000 views generates. Right now that's roughly on the order of $1.4 to $3.5 (it fluctuates based on the ad revenue we get paid by google).
Not terrible!
However, the ultimate problem with the 80/20 split is that it is potentially misleading. Remember how I said there are multiple ways for ad revenue to get dusted? Well, that dusted money has to go somewhere, does it not? And it all goes to the ~20%~ stakeholder share.
In fact the biggest amount of dust is generated from the inleo.io website in general. Any views that aren't blog posts get dusted. This creates a situation where stakeholders can basically earn all the rewards if the vast majority of traffic is going to not-blog-posts, which is currently the case.
How to Earn Evergreen Rewards
To keep this simple:
- Blog post must be published from https://inleo.io (our contract can only recognize canonical links which means links that originate from our UI)
- Blogs post must get at least 200 views in order to get above the dust threshhold
This 200 page views minimum applies to every month individually. If one month you get 400 views and the next you get 199 only the first one is going to pay out. Luckily, once again, this is a very very low bar compared to other sites.
Addendum
In yesterday's post regarding this subject I also made a few incorrect statements about the changes to the reward pool. I was told by a certain someone that ad revenue can still be generated from posts originating from other frontends. This is not the case upon further investigation. All rewards are allocated to inleo posts only. However, I believe it will still be possible to distribute upvotes across any platform.
Our analytics partner servers us page view data, so check this frequently and it will help you analyze your blog posts. You can use the permalink of your blog post to actually check the analytics in real-time.
This will help you tweak what works and what doesn't and drive more page views over time.
Looking at the analytics page gives some interesting stats.
Again it's easy to see why the "20%" stakeholder cut would be so gargantuan compared to the 80% content creator cut. 80% to content creators only applies to specific blog pages that are bringing in traffic, thus the number is very small. However, the Threads 'foryou' and 'latest' pages are at the top of the list in terms of clicks and whatnot. All that ad revenue goes to stakeholders, as they are not associated with any particular user.
Activity is graded on a curve
A few users have complained about their accounts not getting an ad payout. Apparently the algorithm deemed them to be "inactive" for whatever reason. Some have opened a tech support ticket over it. They may or may not get a payment; who knows. However, that's not the point.
The point is this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in yesterday's post. This is a nested loop of centralization. First, we must trust InLEO to properly share the rewards, but also we have to trust Google Adsense to play fair as well. Even so, it's hard to argue that this is a bad implementation considering that all these rewards are icing on the cake in addition to everything else. If it doesn't work out then it doesn't work out. No harm no foul. We must just accept that systems like this have very little transparency by design. Personally I'd say the risk/reward ratio is pretty good considering the risk is zero and the reward is non-zero.
What happens if someone famous gets onboarded?
Before if something like this happened it's kinda like meh that's cool but whatever. Getting one person to join doesn't equate to mainstream adoption or anything. However with a competitive ad model like this (80%+) it could lure content creators from other platforms looking to capitalize on such a big split. Even someone who gets tens of thousands of views would be pretty significant. Some content can even get 6 or 7 figures worth of views, which is pretty crazy when you think about it in terms of ads and the fact that LEO stakeholders also get to scoop the other 20%.
Conclusion
I'm sure there are a few things I missed but this post is already longer than the original document that it was derived from. At the end of the day I got lazy and just read the headlines and started talking out my ass like everyone else. These things happen.
Point being that it's very much going to look like LEO stakeholders are earning the vast majority of ad-share revenue even given an 80/20 split to the content creator's favor. Why? Because posts aren't generating any traffic yet. The community needs time to acclimate to this change, and it will be interesting to see if anyone can do some nice SEO and get actual pageviews that generate web traffic. Hell, maybe I'll even give it a whirl. Look ma, I'm a real blogger!
Just want to jump in and say this to the screenshotted part; shouldn’t it be this way? Creators aren’t doing anything to get those views and thus, the people holding LEO POWER are the ones keeping the platform alive
If creators feel they aren’t getting enough… guess what; generate more views
It’s pay to win if you want the generalized ad revenue pool and its work hard to win if you want to earn ad revenue with no $$ skin in the game
Fair is fair but I bet you dollars to donuts that somebody out there will complain about it. Likely someone who doesn’t own any Leo stake 🤣
If you don’t want $$ skin in the game that’s fine. Invest your sweat. If you don’t want to invest your sweat and you got $$, then invest your $$. It’s a great system and anyone complaining about this setup is just talking their book IMHO
Having skin in the game via stake is crucial, no matter what, in a decentralized environment. People bitch and moan about hive power too and often comes from those without a lot. Sorry kiddo, buck up or shut up.
You are never going to please everyone you and the team are doing a great job!
You're really damned if you do damned if you don't in a situation like this.
You could have written another 5000 word post on this topic but kept it brief.
And people still didn't read it.
Many will complain about the system but hopefully less once it's better understood and the numbers make sense. I'd say it looks pretty good and I'm ready to see some people who actually give a shit about SEO and self-promotion now.
>...systems like this have very little transparency by design.
IMHO, this statement is by far the most valuable and truthful in this whole great post.
Learned from your post clearly more than I did from reading the "RTFD document" Three (3 !) damn times. Well done.
Thanks I was worried that I fumbled this one a bit.
Ah it feels like khal works in the enablement team. Provides ample documentation but minimal or nobody actually reads it and you get asked questions where you want to just refer them back to the documentation lol.
I like the breakdown here dude thanks for that. I’ll have to see if I got any stakeholder rewards that would be neat.
The breakdown for content and ads seems like it will be a good thing in the long run. Pretty rad that we are aiming towards a community vote on an ad. Could you imagine how hard the pharma companies would get fucking vetoed lol
Thanks for doing the hard work for us and reading the documents! I appreciate your recap here. I'm just happy to see some Leo trickling into my account again!
LOL "fud"
I'll have a look at this again in 6-12 months.
What the fuck Elmer?
I think I pissed off the Leo cult for not understanding something, asking questions, and not having enough stake to be able to form a worthwhile opinion. I also made the huge mistake of not reading something before I knew it existed.
That's my takeaway lol...
noob
It's my first day, but I start tomorrow.
oh my bad! make sure to locate the bathrooms, the good ones are hidden.
I ask questions and make myself look like an idiot all the time, it's kind of fun :D I usually wait for people to write about something before I form a biased opinion. Now I know all there is to know about LeoAds rewards and I'm not accepting any alternative information.
I'm so stupid I write "idiot" on my forehead and spell it wrong...
I don't think we are pissed :P
Didn't think you were either.
I said so many things in this post and that's the response I get?
It can be false advertising today if that's the argument you want to make.
You don't have to wait 6 months.
You're the only one on this platform who's told me we should value our own work and be doing more to act like it and get it out into the world and such. Someone comes along and builds a thing for free and says, "Yeah I'll even pay you to do that." And the response to that is what? The free thing that got built that gives away money is a scam? Again that's another argument that can be made if you want to look at the required 500 LEO power as some kind of rug-pull opportunity where nobody is going to get their money back.
Problem is you haven't made any of these arguments you just make a snide comment and then walk away without risking having any type of opinion whatsoever. I think I'm learning the hard way that when I say the word "FUD" people equate this with "lies and ignorance" or making irresponsible comments. FUD is FUD. It means FUD. It has no bearing on truth. If I'm falling off a cliff I'm probably going to experience some FUD, and for good reason.
Or are you just baiting me into writing this ridiculous wall of text by criticizing the usage of 'fud' and then ironically making a baseless fud statement? Fair play nice work.
Trying to find the humor is all. I asked questions. Didn't get answers. Went to look on my own. Took what I saw on the surface. Tried to wrap my head around it.
I left several comments under that post. I wouldn't say anything I said is negative. Aside from what I saw not being enough for me personally to start using that site and only that site.
I had no idea it was being interpreted in this fashion until now. Now that I've learned. I'd sooner laugh it off and move on. Shouldn't be that big of a deal.
P.S. I staked some LEO just to be like that...
I think I'm missing context because I haven't looked at the other post in a while.
It seems like a lot of people are tilting hard over this rollout.
LEO people especially.
The Discord is heated.
The marketing for this service certainly doesn't align with how it actually works.
100% ad-sharing with content creators >> 99% share to stake holders is jarring to say the least.
Since reaching the bare minimum to receive ad revenue will be next to impossible for majority currently creating content over there, I'd try that consumer angle. Eventually that clicked with me. Consumers are stakeholders, too. So if they're receiving ad revenue in this fashion, the content creator is receiving ad revenue indirectly from their votes. One way to spin it.
Then again it might be a much needed wakeup call if getting 10 views a day on something equates to an impossibility. A feature like this may need a little time to fail miserably before it's decided the numbers need refactoring. Perhaps you'd like me to push this agenda personally. It can be arranged.
It's as simple as actually trying and then showing that even a top earner on the platform can't make the cutoff, or showing that I can barely make it whatever the case may be.
Been thinking about this more. Probably too much.
The situation here goes like this: Write a post, push it out, get those views, bring them this way. Do it again, and again and again. That's how you get your ad revenue with no guarantees, and the local consumer base isn't large enough (does inleo even have 200 consumers roaming about constantly).
Each time is a new set of eyes because the consumer base is not here, like it would be on something like Youtube or anywhere else where these ad revenue shares actually work. Every post is like starting fresh with no market.
Impossible is probably the wrong word. Be difficult to earn consistently. Stakeholder role is guaranteed earnings from this. Stakeholder loses if millions of eyes suddenly show up but nobody signs on for consumer perks. Stakeholder earns more if content creators are viewed less, meaning stakeholders are incentivized to not share content like a consumer would. This doesn't gel.
Also, people search, quickly get their info, and leave. I'd say that's normal behavior online. That approach is on its way out the door. Now with AI, people ask, get their answers, don't even need to visit the sites.
I could probably keep going but there's no need. The solution I find every time is to grab the consumers and keep them around. Each post generating outside views is free advertising for all products on chain provided they sign on. Most viewers won't even know about the perks. They wouldn't know they could stand a stronger chance of earning the ad revenue from the content their viewing than the creator. Wouldn't know they could earn from a leaving a comment. Wouldn't know they can earn by supporting rather than throwing their money away. So many missed opportunities for this entire ecosystem.
Most likely I won't be creating content anymore so this isn't for me anyway. I think I'm just sick and tired of the stagnation and want to see something here thrive before I die and that's it.
1000 new sign ups. Not one reaches 200 views yet combined 1000 people generate 200000 views and this is being called "not enough effort, try harder" and "thank you for your ad revenue." Signed, Mr Stakeholder.
Tough sell.
One thing I've never seen before is a paying consumer earning ad revenue. With something like this system LEO is attempting it's almost as if the consumer is the one in charge of handling where the ad revenue goes. Their votes AND their eyes count and they earn. How interesting.
Have you ever read my ramblings about the neglected consumer role here on Hive and these second layer options? Can't even watch a stream now without seeing that money flying around. Platform takes a cut, content creator gets their cut, consumer is out x dollars. Staking tokens and providing consumer perks like curation reward (earning for tipping) and now even ad revenue. Consumers love supporting content creators. It's billions of dollars annually. We have the systems in place (or in development) to provide consumers what they want to spend their money on, yet we sit around scratching our heads wondering where to get "investors" for our tokens. Those investors are called "consumers".
Since the role is neglected consistently, we now have a platform paying out ad revenue, but 200 views is next to "impossible". These things drive me crazy.
I promised myself I'd stop talking about it and even wrote a post where I "retired" from even thinking about it. Yet once again I'm seeing potential in that angle. We have products, perks, but no consumers. Everywhere else consumers outnumber content by a huge margin. Blah blah blah not sure why I even talking about it...
If you're able to see what I'm seeing, and find a way to make others see it, all the power to you.
Hopefully this creates enough incentives for people to actually get the views. 200 views is not that hard, it requires 20 people to comment on it, you replying, them replying back, a few organic views from lurkers and a couple shares in web2 and you have 200 views.
It requires some work though, and most hivers are not known for wanting to do the work and got the extra mile without concrete incentives, lol
I've been able to hit 200 views numerous times. Total, across all frontends. Well over 200, numerous times.
My market/following will read my work on one of the top three frontends. What makes this difficult and even annoying is the fact I'd have to tell them at the start of the post to stop reading and click the link leading to inleo and read the post there.
And there's no way I'd do that because it's an inconvenience for the consumer. I could post from Inleo, but majority will be reading it elsewhere. I and several others did not build our brands on LEO products.
200 views means one qualifies for the smallest share possible. So there's that, too. For me, I could probably earn more by voting comments under my post.
Don't get me wrong though. Maybe some people do need more incentives. But I think for the most part, people are working and trying to get views, with incredible content that goes unnoticed, because there are no fucking consumers here! lol
Never, in the history of me, did I ever want to work for advertisers. Still don't. I also don't want to work for LEO stakeholders scooping up the leftovers. If I designed this system you folks are attempting, that money wouldn't go to stakeholders if content creators don't make the cut. The money would go into a pool and grow, waiting to be paid out to content creators who do qualify. However, seeing how it could potentially reward consumers with ad revenue clicks with me. Far more likely to sell that concept since consumers outnumber creators by a huge margin, and they spend the money anyway. If this system manages to attract them and keep them around, I'd be impressed.
Paying people to create content and attract views is wasteful if the consumer doesn't stick around.
I wonder if this bout of heated confusion will lead to you qualifying for evergreen rewards.
Hint: Probably not, if it all takes place on Discord. (Those ads don't care if you're happy or mad.)
In the end I figured out most of it on my own, before reading this post. Also offered some perspective under your other post on how the idea could be sold to consumers.
Someone freaking out probably wouldn't do that...
!WINE
I'd quite like to see someone famous join and take up the lion's share of the rewards excuse the pun!
I am gonna have to read this white paper myself and 500 LEO for an in is very good!
Now I'm confused, do you really have to stake 500 leo to get something as a Cobtent Creator or not? I understood that you only have to be active and post via InLeo. (I have more than 500, but it would be good to know).
Maybe the Leo team should create a diagram that shows exactly how it works.
Involving the community is very obvious, this idea is not new. I saw it somewhere a long time ago in the Paid4 area. And I've already planned this for my game @hivetycoon, but the game has to be finished first.
I don't know what the point of InLeo is exactly. My plan is for the users to act as moderators. They should not decide whether they like and want to see these adverts, but whether they are allowed. Scam, virus-attempted pages, illegal, possibly Nsfw etc. should not be allowed.
Quasi like Ecency, where it is decided manually whether a post gets a boost because the quality is right.
At least that's my plan and InLeo should define exactly what it's for when the time comes.
Or can I then decide not to show adverts for Apple because I don't like Apple, but for Samsung! I can't imagine that's really the point behind it. But it will certainly be a while before we know more.
!LUV
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Let me know if you want to attend this one fren
https://inleo.io/@town-hall/hive-community-town-hall-4-web3-gaming-on-hive
I always get
Oops! Something went wrong
When trying to open it :(
Wow, all see is humility and sincerity and a show of love, trust and faith in the project.
Thanks for the summary I heard there was some controversy over the disbursement but did not have to look it up or the energy to get involved. I think any progress to help gain value should be seen as positive even if it’s not perfect.