My last post about ad revenue sharing on InLEO got a lot of flak and blowback yesterday. People in the comments telling me it doesn't work the way I'm representing; that users have to have LEO powered up in order to get a piece of the revenue, and even worse that the "100% content-creator sharing" is actually just distributed to stake holders.
Not gonna lie, seeing all that chatter made me panic because... you know I didn't actually look up exactly how it worked. I just blindly advertised it the way it was marketed at face value headline. Certainly not the best strategy here in crypto land. Perhaps I should have done my homework! In this post I'll be revisiting the topic with more nuanced glasses and going over everything I missed.
Khal is understandably very frustrated because he puts this stuff out there and nobody reads it and then everyone is just running around making stuff up based on half truths and filling in the gaps with intuition. This creates a lot of confusion and he ends up answering the same question over and over again in Discord even though it's all in the posted documents. Classic crypto. Wen moon?
Starting at the very beginning, LEO was using some kind of off-brand advertiser at first but they were jerking Khal around and shortchanging the deal. He's since moved it over to Google, which is fine for now. However, the plan is to eventually create a custom community-run implementation.
Then a Poll is run on Threads and the community votes to approve or disprove the Ad proposal. If approved, then the ad runs immediately after the Poll closes with the specified budget, timeframe and ad placement locations.
Even though mentioning the roadmap somewhat clutters this post I couldn't help but quote this because it's actually really cool functionality. How many platforms let their users vote on which ads to allow and which ones to veto? As far as I know the answer is zero (and it still is because this doesn't exist yet).
There are two ways to earn ad revenue from INLEO:
- Be an Active LEO POWER holder
- Create Evergreen Blog Posts From Inleo.io
So essentially this 1000 LEO that I got and bragged about is indeed my cut from being a massive stakeholder. My reward for generating actual traffic appears to be 0.007 LEO; so basically nothing. I haven't yet found out which accounts are making the actual rewards for generating network traffic. Probably very few if any at the moment because getting eyeballs from the outside is no easy feat.
The minimum to receive a distribution is 500 LEO POWER.
Considering the dollar value of 500 LEO these days ($25) this is currently more than fair. I assume this applies to both the stakeholder share and the evergreen share to prevent various forms of Sybil attack and reduce the number of accounts that need to be tracked and distributed to.
The minimum threshhold for traffic is at least 200 views per month (currently - we can tweak this as needed).
There are a couple of different ways to get disqualified from revenue sharing. The first is to be an 'inactive' account. The definition of 'inactive' is dynamic and is graded on a curve to avoid gaming the system with bots and whatnot. However, it takes very little to qualify as active. Maybe one post and a couple comments/threads at most every month. It's a low bar.
Authors earn 80% of the ad revenue generated from views on their content every single month. The other 20% goes to the LEO POWER-based Ad Revenue pool to support the curators who support the creators.
So if your article gets 1,000 views in a month, then you will receive 80% of the ad revenue that those 1000 views generates. Right now that's roughly on the order of $1.4 to $3.5 (it fluctuates based on the ad revenue we get paid by google).
However, the ultimate problem with the 80/20 split is that it is potentially misleading. Remember how I said there are multiple ways for ad revenue to get dusted? Well, that dusted money has to go somewhere, does it not? And it all goes to the 20% stakeholder share.
In fact the biggest amount of dust is generated from the inleo.io website in general. Any views that aren't blog posts get dusted. This creates a situation where stakeholders can basically earn all the rewards if the vast majority of traffic is going to not-blog-posts, which is currently the case.
How to Earn Evergreen Rewards
To keep this simple:
- Blog post must be published from https://inleo.io (our contract can only recognize canonical links which means links that originate from our UI)
- Blogs post must get at least 200 views in order to get above the dust threshhold
This 200 page views minimum applies to every month individually. If one month you get 400 views and the next you get 199 only the first one is going to pay out. Luckily, once again, this is a very very low bar compared to other sites.
In yesterday's post regarding this subject I also made a few incorrect statements about the changes to the reward pool. I was told by a certain someone that ad revenue can still be generated from posts originating from other frontends. This is not the case upon further investigation. All rewards are allocated to inleo posts only. However, I believe it will still be possible to distribute upvotes across any platform.
Our analytics partner servers us page view data, so check this frequently and it will help you analyze your blog posts. You can use the permalink of your blog post to actually check the analytics in real-time.
This will help you tweak what works and what doesn't and drive more page views over time.
Again it's easy to see why the "20%" stakeholder cut would be so gargantuan compared to the 80% content creator cut. 80% to content creators only applies to specific blog pages that are bringing in traffic, thus the number is very small. However, the Threads 'foryou' and 'latest' pages are at the top of the list in terms of clicks and whatnot. All that ad revenue goes to stakeholders, as they are not associated with any particular user.
A few users have complained about their accounts not getting an ad payout. Apparently the algorithm deemed them to be "inactive" for whatever reason. Some have opened a tech support ticket over it. They may or may not get a payment; who knows. However, that's not the point.
The point is this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in yesterday's post. This is a nested loop of centralization. First, we must trust InLEO to properly share the rewards, but also we have to trust Google Adsense to play fair as well. Even so, it's hard to argue that this is a bad implementation considering that all these rewards are icing on the cake in addition to everything else. If it doesn't work out then it doesn't work out. No harm no foul. We must just accept that systems like this have very little transparency by design. Personally I'd say the risk/reward ratio is pretty good considering the risk is zero and the reward is non-zero.
Before if something like this happened it's kinda like meh that's cool but whatever. Getting one person to join doesn't equate to mainstream adoption or anything. However with a competitive ad model like this (80%+) it could lure content creators from other platforms looking to capitalize on such a big split. Even someone who gets tens of thousands of views would be pretty significant. Some content can even get 6 or 7 figures worth of views, which is pretty crazy when you think about it in terms of ads and the fact that LEO stakeholders also get to scoop the other 20%.
I'm sure there are a few things I missed but this post is already longer than the original document that it was derived from. At the end of the day I got lazy and just read the headlines and started talking out my ass like everyone else. These things happen.
Point being that it's very much going to look like LEO stakeholders are earning the vast majority of ad-share revenue even given an 80/20 split to the content creator's favor. Why? Because posts aren't generating any traffic yet. The community needs time to acclimate to this change, and it will be interesting to see if anyone can do some nice SEO and get actual pageviews that generate web traffic. Hell, maybe I'll even give it a whirl. Look ma, I'm a real blogger!
