We have previously discussed multiple advertising tactics to help you to get people to view your content on our free photo hosting site ClickASnap here and elsewhere. One of our tips is to create and host your own blog managing your own content. Since we wrote that article we have come across a site called Niume and similar to our article on Co-promote we thought we would have a go with it.
Niume has been around since 2012 having secured in the region of $1M in funding to get them to where they are today. It is a collaborative blogging platform, it consists of a multitude of spheres and a user posts their content on the platform (Be aware of the terms and conditions, Niume owns your content and has the right to do as they please with it https://niume.com/terms/ clause 14: You own the rights to the content you post on the Site but when you upload or post content to our Site; you grant a perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty free, worldwide licence to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, prepare derivative works of, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute any IP content that you post on our Site in any and all media or distribution methods (not known or later developed.)) As an example see the photo uploaded directly to Meta below: (this picture having been uploaded to Meta is now owned by Meta)
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Once your content is posted on the site other users get to view it, and it’s marketed as a blogging platform with a ready made audience. As of August 2016 they also started paying out $0.001 cents per read. So, other than the content warning it all sounds good, and as we are always looking for new ways to promote our content and share these promotional methods with our readers we decided to try it out. Our results are as follows:
So, the experiment!
We posted 18 posts on a daily basis excluding weekends, this is a similar practice to what we have on our own blog. Our results:
4,200 likes
435 reads
$0.43 cents earnt
8 link clicks
Firstly, let’s tackle the money aspect. Between Amazon Affiliation and our two advertising networks on our own blog for the same volume of ‘Reads’ We would earn £5.23 versus just shy of £0.30 here. Ok, we have hosting and setup costs, BUT hosting a wordpress website these days can be less than £1 per month so even with that included it is a still profit over hosting on Niume, plus you also own the platform and the content.
Secondly, the likes versus the reads. This is very strange, and i believe it is likely a ploy of some sort to give a heightened illusion of interaction, when in fact it is extremely low, and likely consists of many users ‘liking’ content in an attempt to get paid views back.
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Thirdly the traffic driver, Niume, because so few people actually click through and look at the content, is a very poor traffic driver. What also doesn’t help is the incredibly low quality of the content on the platform. There are a few good posts/pictures but the majority is terrible and wading through the rubbish to get at the quality isn’t worth the time required to do so.
So the pros and cons of using Niume:
Pros:
- There is an audience there
- You can and do earn money
- It is a very easy and simple site to use
Cons:
- The audience is very small, comparative to sharing any of your own posts to your existing networks anyhow
- The money you earn is a fraction of what you can earn hosting your own blog
- You don’t own or have any rights to the platform or your content. Moving to your own platform from such a a site would be very difficult
- The platform can do as they please with your work, including directly uploading it to sites like Meta
As with any site there are pros and cons. If you use Niume let us know what you think in the comments below!
Edit 13/12/17
What happened to Niume?
Niume stopped paying it’s users shortly after this article was published. Once Niume stopped paying it’s users it lost it’s user base. The question i’m sure many users will ask is ‘Why did this happen?’ I am obviously not involved with Niume so i can only speculate based on my knowledge of how websites and online monetisation systems work.
As mentioned previously in this article Niume had one revenue stream: Advertising. This was used to pay the users a fixed pay rate of about $0.001 per view. This payment was based purely on the user opening an article for any period of time, and technically not even looking at the article that had been written. Because of the Click circles the articles were often of exceptionally poor quality with the aim to purely just get some words on a page that can be opened by friends and revenue gained. This in turn led to groups moving into click circles where each user within the group would post an article and every other user in the group would then open each others articles, this resulted in zero (or near zero) ad revenue for Niume but also had to continue to pay out revenue for those users who were having their posts read. You can actually see discussions between these click groups here. This particular forum thread is concerning Virily which took over from Niume and has become one of the main target sites for click circles. The irony of course is that the more pages the users open the lower the revenue produced is, and the less they get for more work put in. This is because there is a misconception that ad revenue is infinite and every page view results in ‘X’ revenue. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like this, and typically after 10 page views or so (certainly using an RTB exchange) revenue becomes zero.
So if you’re reading this, and you’re using a site that shares it’s revenue with you, don’t join these click circles as they will always ultimately fail and the more work you put in to viewing other users work in the circle, the less you’ll earn. If you want to earn, and earn well, write good concise articles, or post high quality, well tagged and well described images, this is the only way to earn and earn big.
8 Responses
Hi Tom,
I think you are right, but also not entirely right. I think I might compare myself to your experiment. I joined Niume just after I found out about it via your post in the ClickaSnap forum. So far I have 7 posts, 1200 likes, about 400 reads and thus $0.40 earned. That is roughly the same amount of reads and money as you have on your 18 posts.
What I find from both my small experience and also what I’ve read is that the like/read ratio is quite different in the different spheres. In the Photography sphere, you get lots of likes but very few reads. I have also posted in the Travel sphere, and there I have got the majority of my reads, but very few likes. It also seems like the Interesting sphere gives relatively many reads, but I haven’t tried that yet. So I think it is a good idea to not only post in Photography, but also elsewhere.
Regarding the money aspect of Niume versus your own blog, I don’t agree at all. Three weeks of using Niume has given me potentially (if I ever reach the $10 limit) $0.40. Three years with my WordPress blog https://hpbirkeland.com has given me a yearly expense of $26.00 and exactly zero in return. So from an economical standpoint the choice is easy.
Certainly interesting points there Hans. Will be interesting to see where the site goes
Hi, Hans, I wrote my answer on that below too…
Hi to both Tom and Hans Petter!
I would like to add some of my thoughts on this subject and ask something, since I am also a member of NIume since November 2016.
First, the thing is that “likes” or how they are called on NIume, “hypes”, are measured differently than classical likes. Here you can get 15 “likes” = 15 hype (or 20, 50, etc.), which could also come from only one person because that person has a “status” of 15 hypes (or 20, 50, etc) which is measured by how much other people hype you, so your status grows depending how much people hype you (“like” you) and then when you “like” someone’s post you are giving him that same amount of “likes” (hypes) = 15.
Then, I agree with Hans Petter when saying that in different spheres posts get different amount of views and “likes” (hypes). The thing is same with me when it comes to my photography posts (more hypes and less views) and more views and less hypes when it comes to my art posts.
The problem is that now Niume has made some changes regarding the system that counts views and there is A LOT of users complaining. Everybody have something like 5 views per day now… Althouh when somebody gives you a hype or a comment now it also counts as a view.
I must say it was hard for me to earn on Niume even when the views were higher and especially now when the views are very low… I was getting around 100 views per day before this happend, but some users were having much much more which is not that clear to me how…
I have a free blog page on WordPress (not a paid blog) on which I share my Niume posts and don’t have much views there too.
So I wanted to ask does that thing with opening your own blog refer to blogs on Blogger and similar blogs too, since I am thinking opening one there too? Which one is the best?
Thank you!
(Sorry for my bad English :))
We stopped using the platform several weeks ago when we found it useless as a traffic driver. So unfortunately don’t really know anything about the lack of views now, although, rumour has it some user ran a script falsifying users views to increase the payout frequency and this led to the existing view clampdown. When talking about opening your own blog we were specifically talking about WordPress, however there are many other blogging options out there
Hi, thank you for your answer.
Yes, that is correct – regarding falsifying views…
Ok, thanks. I don’t know how it works so well for you, it is good, but I really don’t have that much of a traffic there… Do you know what other blog could do that well too…?
Thanks.
Best!
Paid-per-view community blogging (photo-sharing) platforms are not really about the money but are often a good venue for social interaction and meeting new people with similar interests.
The owners of these sites need content to attract visitors to earn from advertising, and are prepared to offer micro-payments in return.
Of course, if a content-producer gets a huge following, the revenue-earning potential is also there for them.
Unfortunately, those hoping to make money out of the content they post elsewhere often find ways to abuse the system.
https://niume.com/post/195799
Hosting our own websites for our own content always makes more sense, in that we get to keep all the advertising revenue ourselves and have greater control on the look and feel.
Then join the community websites to get the word out.
Certaninly true to some extents in fact we wrote an article discussing niume here However, there are significant upfront or ongoing costs for having your own website, particularly if you want it to be as automated as possible. for example, a decent website done by a mid level company will cost you about £2,000 (yes you can use Wix, or 1&1 but then you’re locked into an ongoing cost of upto £45 per month per site) Add in ecommerce and the management systems behind that and that’s another couple hundred pounds, or you can of course sub it out to someone like smugmug but that’s another £26 a month, then there’s technical issues, promotion of your website, server management, finding advertisers and once you’ve found the advertisers ensuring you stay within their strict guidelines and so on ad inifinitum really. Or, you can sign up to ClickASnap for free, add in an ecommerce account for £3 a month and not have to worry about anything 🙂