Chinalyst: Revenue sharing and referral rewards

Chinalyst is now 6 months old, and I'm quite pleased to see how much Chinalyst has grown during this time. The Chinalyst community now registers 86 China related blogs and is visited by hundreds of people daily with hundreds more getting updates through RSS.

Looking through the Chinalyst frontpage I'm overwhelmed with the power of the English China blogosphere and the quality of information provided. I strongly believe that in the case of China, the blogosphere is the best source of information for what's going on, and I'm hoping that Chinalyst has contributed to the growth and development of the blogosphere.

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To celebrate, Chinalyst is now running a unique model for rewarding everybody who's contributing to the community, and so I'm happy to announce our revenue-sharing and referrals model.

Revenue sharing

A month or so ago, to support our increasing hosting and maintenance costs, we've implemented some small Google ads on the site. Since the site is built around the blogosphere and the community users, we've implemented a revenue sharing mechanism on all contributed content to the site.

When a blogger submits a blog, the blog and its aggregated feeds on Chinalyst belong to the blogger and he may edit and delete them at any time without any help. When a user posts a message on the forums, the user owns that message and can manage it at any time. Using this ownership model, it is now possible for the owner to receive ~50% of the ads revenue for the content that was contributed - both for aggregated posts and forum postings.

The way this works is that the users enter their Google ID in their account, information which is public information, and 50% of the ads that will be displayed on the content they contributed will be with their Google ID. A click on content in this site with the users' ad displayed will cash the users the amount paid for that click.

The more popular the content, the more content contributed - the bigger the reward. Looking at the "all-time popular content" section on the right sidebar you might notice a few bloggers that, aside from getting inbound traffic, could have made a buck or two for their wonderful posts.

Referrals

Some bloggers have been very kind in linking to Chinalyst and helping the community grow. To reward such bloggers it is now possible to refer users through a referral link. Referring a user to Chinalyst will grant the referring source ~5% of all ad revenue that comes from the content that the referred user contributed.

Summing up, Chinalyst shares 50-55% of the its revenue with the community members, and I do hope that users will take advantage of this program.

For more information on how this works and how to set this up on your user account, please check out the "Revenue sharing" and "Referrals rewards" sections under "Guides and FAQ".

Thank you for being a part of Chinalyst.