Let me start this post off with an important note: "revenue share" writing sites are generally not recommended to those aspiring to have a writing career. However, there are some useful applications depending on what your personal goals and situation are.
Revenue share sites are those that accept nearly all writers and allow you to write about almost anything, but usually don't pay you anything up front. Instead, they run ads on your work and share the revenue with you. Usually they keep the lion's share of the revenue, so this isn't a lucrative arrangement for you.
For the revenue share site to benefit you financially, it would need to draw far more traffic (usually by being positioned as a favorite "authority" site in the Google search results) to the article than you would by posting it on your own blog and slapping AdSense or something into it. Most of these sites never really draw that sort of traffic, either because they're small and scammy operations or because Google keeps torpedoing them in the search rankings for having low quality content and/or using "black hat" SEO tricks to try to game the system.
I'm sure some people out there have fond memories of getting a repeating $10 or $20 a month per article with Associated Content / Squidoo back in the day just for pooping out a blog post off the top of their head, though, and are hoping that some sort of similar service makes a big comeback.
To that end, we're rounding up all the options that are out there in today's post. Some have turned out to actually be viable. Direct and significant payment can be hard to come by, but some actually do provide legitimate exposure and a byline that you can possibly use to get jobs or gigs in the future. Some allow you to slide your own affiliate links in as well. So there's at least some potential with some of these.
Let's check 'em out!
Cultured Vultures
Invoking the image of a vulture in a revenue share site is, well, uh .... yeah.
Also, their definition of "culture vulture" - a person who is very interested in the arts - ain't exactly how this term is usually applied in the common vernacular.
Nevertheless, let's see what's going on here. The site is best described as a wannabe G/O Media model. They cover a number of different entertainment-focused categories and they focus on pumping out volume.
The areas they currently cover are gaming, TV, film, wrestling and books. They look for pieces of 200 to 1000 words, depending on what category you are writing in. You're apparently granting them an exclusive usage right - that means that you still own the rights to each piece, but as long as they're displaying it you can't post it anywhere else or sell it to anyone else. You can have pieces removed by closing your account with them, however.
So what do you get out of all this? Well, at minimum you're guaranteed a byline with a short bio.
There actually is some upfront payment in some categories, though it's small: 2 GBP for feature articles and 1.50 GBP for news items (about $3-4 in USD depending on the current exchange rate).
That's garbage pay, of course, but there's also a revenue share component of 2 GBP per 200 views. That's actually a pretty high rate as these revenue share sites go, but there's a big catch: you only get rev share during the first week your piece is published (ending Saturday night). Payment is weekly by PayPal.
There are some limited circumstances where this might work out for you. It's a terrible deal for evergreen content, but if you cover breaking news items that you know there will be a lot of searches for and/or have a sizable existing social media following that you can drive there to share your pieces quickly in the first week you might actually make something halfway respectable.
Hubpages
Hubpages is the one big site still chugging along using the old Squidoo model. You basically toss up blog posts on whatever, HubPages slides ad code into it and takes 40% of whatever that ends up making.
You could do this sort of thing with your own website or such, but the advantage of Hubpages is that it will rank much higher in search results than some new no-name website or blog just starting out will. Though it's sometimes regarded as a source of low-quality information and has been through bouts of Google penalties because of that, Hubpages nevertheless draws between half a million to a million views daily and is one of the top 1000 most-visited sites in the world (a lot closer to 1000 than 1, but it's in the mix).
Infobarrel
Infobarrel allows you to post on pretty much whatever you want, and you'll receive 75% of the ad revenue here. However, there is a somewhat confusing system of two "tiers" that each piece can fall into, and one tier seems to pay much more than the other.
The biggest issues here are that Infobarrel only gets a fraction of the traffic that Hubpages does, and their policy on removing your own content is unclear. Some posts I've seen from site users also indicate that the revenue system tends to fluctuate at times (different pay from month to month) and that the site is a one-man operation in terms of administration.
Medium
Medium isn't generally thought of as a "revenue share" site; it's a self-publishing platform where you can throw up simple and clean professional-looking articles without having to start your own website / blog up or learn anything about code.
It does have a revenue share component, however. You can opt to put your articles in the paywalled section of the site that only the monthly subscribers have access to. As of a couple of months ago, Medium changed the payment system from being based on "claps" (likes) to being based on reader engagement time (with possibly a share of claps in the mix). So you're essentially sharing in the site's subscription fees.
The problem with all that is that Medium doesn't make clear how much you earn per second / clap / whatever, so you're never sure exactly what you'll make.
If you opt to put pieces in the non-paywalled section of the site, you're basically writing for exposure as there is no compensation system. However, this is a valid strategy for some people as Medium ranks very well in the search results (far better than any other rev share site). And it's not totally without financial value - you're allowed to include up to two in-line affiliate links in each post (clickable text, not display ads) so long as you disclose them properly.
Redgage
As best I can figure out, Redgage is a "social bookmarking" site that pays for impressions. This is the same basic model as Digg and etc., one that has pretty much died out at this point outside of Reddit. But Redgage is still online and active as of this writing, and appears to still be paying.
The way social bookmarking sites traditionally worked is that you would post a descriptive text snippet and thumbnail image linking to the off-site content in question. Redgage has a "links" section that does that, but most of the content on the site actually seems to just be copied from the source and displayed directly from their servers. Like, if you "link" a blog post or image this way, Redgage is just directly displaying a copy of the image or text and monetizing with their own ads.
That kinda defeats the purpose of social bookmarking, which was first and foremost to drive traffic to your own site. Why click through if all the content is already displaying on Redgage?
In the event you're still interested, Redgage pays per 1,000 views. As to what that amount is, it's impossible to tell; the terms of service says it's " ... determined solely by the Company based on its proprietary algorithms." So it's opaque to you and probably fluctuates, like Medium. A couple of anecdotal forum posts and blogs I saw indicated that you can expect about $1 per 1,000 views. However, it's important to note that apparently the only way to get paid is to sign up for some sort of Visa debit card system they use ... and you have to pay $5 to get a card!
This site has apparently been around since 2010, yet this is the first I've ever heard of it ... on the other hand, it's managed to survive this long in relative obscurity so maybe that's a good sign that they pay out? I'm not writing this off entirely but I would approach it with a whole lot of caution ... any content you cross-post there might get nuked out of the search engine results given that I've never once seen this site appear in an organic search, not even on like page 10.
Steemit
Steemit is an interesting idea. It's a sort of punkrawk anarchist revenue share site that pays in Bitcoin, where upvotes to both your content and your comments earn money.
The difference is that the payouts are based on the ever-growing value of Steam's internal economy ... that's a complicated topic, but the long and short of it is that the site only pays you for the first seven days after a new piece of content (or comment) is posted.
Casual browsing of it makes it appear that the economy is subject to manipulation by "whales" at the top, and regular people rarely see more than $1 per piece of content, so I haven't really put any time into it.
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Any others you'd like to see added / scouted? Please leave a comment below or send me an email.
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