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:

1. There is an audience there
2. You can and do earn money
3. It is a very easy and simple site to use

Cons:

1. The audience is very small, comparative to sharing any of your own posts to your existing networks anyhow
2. The money you earn is a fraction of what you can earn hosting your own blog
3. 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
4. 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.