A paid blogging community changes its format

There are many ways to get paid for blogging. The most obvious way is to get a free blog on blogger, myspace or one of the many thousands of other places and start a blog and in time put advertisiments on the blog and pray that you will get some money from your efforts. Another way is to buy your own domain and hosting then contract with several of the paid blogging companies there are. Currently the work load is light from those companies and the pay rate is about $5 a post. Yet. another way is to join a community blogging site.

Community blogging is different since you are either paid to write a post or you generate income at a percentage of what the parent company gets. Years ago I started out on BlogFeast, a now defunct blogging community. They paid you via Google adsense money. What they did was ask for your Google ads account number and told you that every 4 out of 5 clicks on one of the ads appearing on your blog at their site would earn you that money. They claimed a payout rate of 90% to you and they got 10%. That was fine until a few bloggers found out that it was more like 20% / 80%, with you getting the 20%. Bloggers then left and the company folded.

Now another company is trying the same thing, this time it is Today.com (I have an ad for them in the side bar just down a ways). Originally they paid their bloggers $2 a post, then it went to $2 per 1000 views. Starting today they are now 50% Google ad share revenue. I wonder what prompted the change? I have noticed that bloggers have been leaving the community in droves and they have shut down their forum for "maintenance."

I have a blog over at Today.com and I post in it about once every 2 weeks. Currently I get 400 visitors a day and the pay was not as good as I had hoped. I will be monitoring the change and see if they are honest about the Google adsense rev share program or not. The only advantage right now is that I have the visitor count to the blog that should make at least .50 cents a day, if not more. That is not bad for just letting the blog sit and earn money. I do have to keep it "active" by posting to the blog at least once in 30 days otherwise they close the account.

I will keep you posted on how they are paying and if it is worth the time and effort to start a blog there now that they have changed their format.