LeoAds has been something in the works for over 2 years now. We've gone back to the drawing board several times on various aspects of the design. Then - about 1 year ago - Project Blank was forming into reality. On May 1st, 2023, we officially launched the Project Blank UI.
Once that was in place, it was time to get back to working on ad placements, optimizations and earnings. We had some issues with our previous ad partners who were severely underpaying us because they thought they could get away with it.
After months of politically battling them, we dropped them as an ad partner on INLEO. We moved to Google Adsense.
Google Adsense has its pro's and con's but for right now, it's a good default option. In the long-run, we've always intended to build our own in-app Ad Network.
The plan for that has been laid out several times in various AMAs and blog posts. It will look a lot like Facebook Ads Manager (for example). Companies will get an ad manager interface on inleo.io and be able to upload ads and submit them for approval.
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.
That is the future of ad placement on INLEO. For now, we're working with Google Adsense to earn what we can as we continue to build toward 10,000 Monthly Active Users.
The First LeoAds Distribution
The first ever LeoAds distribution finally went out yesterday. Many of you have been following along as we worked on this. It hasn't been an easy task.
There are multiple layers of complexity here:
- Ad Revenue earned into the smart contract that buys LEO each week
- Contract to read LEO POWER holders' activity each month
- Contract to read analytics on all blog posts created from inleo.io to award a % of ad revenue to evergreen content that attracts a certain amount of views
- Distribution contract
We solved the first 3 before the end of 2023 but then the distribution contract was giving us quite a few headaches. We finally solved for that yesterday and as you guys saw; the first payouts went out.
The first payouts constituted just 1 month of Ad Revenue. Each month is not the same and you will see it fluctuate based on overall traffic to INLEO.
How It Works
As you can see, this part of the distribution is to LEO POWER holders. It's based on how much LEO you have staked in your account.
There are two ways to earn ad revenue from INLEO:
- Be an Active LEO POWER holder
- Create Evergreen Blog Posts From Inleo.io
Be an Active LEO POWER Holder
There is a minimum threshhold of activity. If you create a few threads, maybe 1 blog post and send out a couple of upvotes each month, then you will have no problem meeting that minimum threshhold.
Once you've met the minimum amount of activity, then you are eligible for LeoAds revenue. The contract checks your account to see how much LEO POWER you have. The minimum to receive a distribution is 500 LEO POWER. So you need to have at least 500 LP in order to be eligible (otherwise the payouts would be dust).
Provided you a) meet the minimum for activity and b) meet the minimum 500 LP staked, then you will receive a stake-weighted airdrop on the 1st of every month based on how much the total Ad Revenue pool is for that month and how much of the total LEO POWER you have staked. Stake more LEO POWER to earn more Ad Revenue.
Create Evergreen Blog Posts From Inleo.io
The second way to earn Ad Revenue is to create long-form blog posts from https://inleo.io and drive traffic to them.
The minimum threshhold for traffic is at least 200 views per month (currently - we can tweak this as needed).
Quick side note: X requires you to have 5 MILLION impressions per month in order to be eligible for ad revenue. We only require 200. Let that sink in, Elon ;)
FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER Hive blog posts can now earn rewards beyond the 7 day payout window. When you create a blog post from inleo.io, you earn the normal Hive Blog Rewards in the first 7 days from the upvote rewards pool of both HIVE and LEO rewards.
Then, your content becomes eligible for Evergreen Rewards. It needs to meet the minimum of 200 views per month but once it hits that, all the views count toward evergreen rewards.
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).
1,000 views is nothing. Keep in mind that a trending article on google could easily get 1,000,000+ views per month.
Now Hive has always struggled with outside attention. I believe a big reason for this is that there are no incentives in place to encourage authors on Hive to actually go after outside attention.
That's why most of the top rewarded blog posts on Hive are inward facing. You write about Hive or you write about LEO because you know that people on Hive/Leo will upvote you more when you talk about those things.
But those don't do well to the outside world.
For the first time ever, you're now incentivized to write about other things in the world and then go out and promote your writing to generate traffic on your articles.
When you generate traffic, you earn more ad revenue.
In Perpetuity
This is a hard thing for people to wrap their heads around. Your Hive Blog posts - provided they're posted from https://inleo.io - now earn rewards FOREVER.
So if you posted something 2 years ago and it gets 1,000 views every single month for the next 20 years, you will earn 80% of the ad revenue on those 1,000 views every single month for the next 20 years automatically sent to your Hive account.
Think about that.
If you write 2 super high quality blog posts each day (60 per month) for 1 year, then you will have written 720 blog posts in a year.
If any material % of those blog posts are SEO-focused and can drive in long-term traffic, you will be getting paid every single month from those posts... forever.
Hive Authors have been limited to the 7 day payout window. Limited to what the Rewards Pool can pay them.
That is no longer the case. Anyone can earn evergreen rewards now.
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
That's it. From there, you'll simply see @leoads sending you money every single month based on the views generated from your blog post.
Tips
I'll leave it up to some community members who are really good at creating SEO content / outward facing content that generates views. There are tons of them out there who create great blog posts, share them on X and generate traffic.
You need to start thinking a little differently if you want to earn evergreen ad revenue checks. It requires a different kind of content creation than what we are accustomed to on Hive in the past.
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.
https://simpleanalytics.com/inleo.io
Questions?
LeoAds is quite complex even if it may not seem so on the surface. Like I said, you've got multiple layers of complexity happening here.
If you have any questions, comment them below and the LeoTeam will answer!