Seeing more platforms experimenting with paying users for engagement (reading, commenting, sharing) rather than just displaying ads. Found one example implementing this: https://aprilpad.com/earn-cash-daily-on-april-pad/ The business model: - Users earn small amounts for engagement - Platform monetizes through services and ads - Creates stickiness and repeat visits - Affiliate layer (30% commission) for growth Thinking about this from a marketing perspective - does incentivizing engagement actually build a quality audience? Or just attract reward-hunters who don't genuinely engage? For those running content sites - would you consider adding earning incentives for your users? What are the pros/cons?
It's not really new and before I signed up with a site like that I'd want to understand their business model and how they're making it sustainable. I see ads for games where you get paid to play and it's unclear (from the ads) how you actually earn the money - I'm assuming it's watching more ads because playing solitaire is not a traditional career path. This forum used to reward people who started threads by having a chance that the ads shown would be using your AdSense publisher IDs. In the end, that got shut down by AdSense. I guess they wanted more control over where the ads were shown and sharing your publisher id far and wide probably wasn't very secure. Ref: https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/now-get-paid-to-use-this-forum-no-joke.519/
X recently paused the creator revenue sharing program for many accounts, primarily due to spam. I wouldn't be surprised if this was partly due to financial pressures. However, I can see how paying content creators on X could backfire. Someone posts a video, which goes viral, others repost it, reducing profitability for the original creator, and repeated reposting leads to excessive spam.
By the way, how do you access those threads? All I see is about 2, sometimes 3 pages. Do I have to do a search to find them? How do search engines find them? As an example, only 96 results:
I did see an interesting "pay the user" model. It asked you to record your answers to a survey and they would pay you a slightly higher than typical fee for completing the survey. So, my guess is not only are they selling the survey results to an interested business, they are also selling the recorded voices to companies training Voice AI models. Voice AI training data can command a nice fee, these days.
Most websites are still stuck with the old school model of content marketing. The more viral the article goes, the higher the risk and lesser the revenues to the original. However, the most modern model goes in the exact opposite direction. The publisher is paid upfront and earns more each time a new article goes viral. One example similar to April Pad is Admailr. The advertiser pays a desired amount, and publishers share the information in their newsletters. Both platforms earn each time an article goes viral. The more publishers share, the better it gets.
The current 2-3 pages for the "New Posts" section is insufficient and likely suppresses user engagement. I rarely visit the "Forums" tab because it feels disconnected from active discussions. If the "New Posts" page expanded to 20-30 pages it'd boost engagement rates in my opinion.
Yeah, true — it’s a smarter system. Gives publishers real value upfront instead of waiting for traffic spikes to maybe pay off later.