Train Thoughts

The LightSpeed blog has some commentary on monetary rewards and how it impacts user behavior.  HubPages shares revenue with publishers.  One of the reasons we did this with our publishing platform was to encourage commercial content.  We believe that user generated content can be monetized effectively if what’s created is commercial in nature.  To encourage commercial content, we decided to pay authors a percent of the revenue.

For the most part, it works.  HubPages earns around a $10 RPM.  That’s pretty good relative to a diversified set of content on many subjects.  When we break it down by category, there are sections like finance that earn over $30 RPMs.  However, there is certainly truth to that people participate for all sorts of reasons.  Several of the best authors participate on HubPages for reasons other than money.