MatrixWorkz:

Your words sound constantly like Caps. There's no need to write in bold to be rude, arrogant or condescending. There's no need to be rude, arrogant or condescending in order to be heard.

Check the way you interact with the world and then please ignore all my posts.

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." Albert Einstein

Deskar

Thank you, Jake. You've been very clear.I suggest for your explanation to be placed in a more visible place. The FAQ, for instance.

...    * Google pays per click-through. So some pageviews when there are Google ads we are making $0, other times, when there is  a click-through, we can get  anywhere between 50 cents and $10 for the pageview. (PS: this doesn't mean you should click on all the ads all the time! Although clicking casually on things you are interested in would definitely help, we do not want to lose our account because of click fraud!)

    * Other (in our opinion, better) advertisers pay on a pay-per-view basis. For those of you in the States, you'll see TribalFusion ads, and in the near future, 24/7 Realmedia ads. These guys pay $1-$10 per 1,000 pageviews, which although isn't great, it's something, and better than we have been experiencing.

          o But, here's one of the real challenges: we have an enormous international user base that's growing daily. We're very grateful for the contributions they have made, and definitely don't want to discourage them from coming. But the truth is that advertisers will not pay for international traffic. So the $1-$10 number above drops to 0 for a lot of our users.

          o Essentially, we make money off of the US users, and split that number amongst pageviews which include international.

          o If you really want to help in this respect, spread the word about ShareCG in forums, etc. where there are a lot of US users. I'm not positive that I know where that is, but I think CGSociety does. The way to popularize it, by the way, is by posting links to your content (which of course helps you), but real content is often a more interesting draw than an admittedly lame homepage.

          o Also, add your pages to directories like digg, stumbleupon, etc. We'll try to set up tools that help in that respect. Whenever something is picked by stumbleupon, for example, we get massive influxes of US traffic.

      * Finally, we every-so-often get advertisers who buy ads directly from our site. They are usually very, very targetted (e.g., Autodesk), but for whatever reason they don't get enough click-throughs. Please, if you're interested in them, CLICK! Whenever they come, they are our higher-paying users.

    * Finally, we're going to be starting soon with video-ads. They're going to be slightly annoying, but usually no more than 10 seconds for short videos, and 30 seconds for long videos. They should really help monetize a space of our site that we haven't been yet.

    * We're also considering restructuring the pages so that we can cram more ads in there (without it looking bad--in fact, it'll look better). Basically, we're doing what we can with very limited resources (you can imagine if we're making .007 cents per page...) If you do what you can to bring US traffic, and to ensure pay-per-click and specific ads are clicked, we'll be in a better place...

Continues in next post

Edited by Deskar on 11/07/07 10:14 AM.

Of course it is still unfair for all those that month after month get less per view. It may not be entirely SCG's fault, but I guess that some measures to protect members could be put in place. After all, we are the ground on which the whole project is built upon.

How about translating the indispensable minimum to browse? That way many views would come from countries that (it should be checked first) might pay for the views. Renderosity has recently translated part of their site to French, German, Japanese and Spanish, although most of the income there is generated by product sales. Shvoong offers content in 34 different languages. On the other hand, they pay almost nothing to their members. Perhaps it could be translated to those languages which countries are willing to buy advertisement. Was a market research conducted about this?

I celebrate energetically the good will for communication that SCG has towards its members. Knowing the data you explained above allows us to establish useful promotion strategies. I hope the experiences of other sites where free content is offered help SCG. These sites don't value the content provider and let the view rate drop to the ground. Potential new members think twice before investing their time and efforts in such places. I guess such a commercial strategy might still generate profits, but less than it could if the unit price was kept high. I hope that's not SCG's intention. In practice, we see the unit price dropping month after month, anyway.

Soon it won't be worth uploading stuff. 

I sincerely hope that this trend is reversed somehow. 

Deskar,

Your words are just as rude to me as apparently mine are to you so take your own advice and ignore my posts from now on. I'm not the one demanding that payouts be made to me based on ignorance of the FAQ. I'm not the one whining about unfair payouts, and I'm not the one demanding that people write their posts in a way that is acceptable to me. I'm not writing in CAPS or bold except where it was bold when I cut and pasted it from the FAQ and I'm not responsible for you taking things the wrong way.

Now as Jake has given us even more information, it's pretty clear to me that the most of the people complaining about the way things are run around here are international  users and it's the US users and visitors who are generating the income. I'd say THAT's unfair to us!  

MatrixWorkz,

I didn't have the intention to reply to your post, but your tendency to try to win a discussion by misinforming people is very harming for SCG and its members and it can't be let pass.

It is not true, as you say, that international users complain and US users generate the income, since it doesn't matter where a content-generating member comes from but, as Jake said, the important thing is where the visitor comes from (the person that is looking for content).

You're practically inviting for a witch hunt. 

It is evident to me that it is more important for you to win an arguement, even if it harms us all, than to make a constructive criticism. 

Deskar

Edited by marcodd on 11/07/07 02:17 PM.