This post is in response to a thread started in our forums by Sebastian about revenue sharing in the new Gift Store on 20SB. Rather than reply there, we thought it would be appropriate to address it here on the blog so everyone had a chance to see it.
There are times at which we charge money to engage with 20 Something Bloggers. Recently, we brought the Gift Store into the community, and the platform has a revenue sharing functionality which we honestly haven’t fully evaluated yet. We’ll probably turn it on, because we’re trying hard to create some revenue streams to cover the time and cost of running 20SB.
We want you to know that, and welcome your feedback on the subject.
Lisa and I spend countless hours on 20SB…I stopped tracking my own time because it was getting depressing, but my average over 4 months was about 30 hours a week.
We also have some great volunteers who are just that; volunteers. Some in particular are active here and behind the scenes for quite significant amounts of time and we really would like to compensate them at some point down the road.
I hope this is is obvious, but we really try to keep this community an authentic, welcoming, non-spammy, useful and interesting place for everyone to be. We care more about the integrity of this place than the money. That’s WHY we’ve spent significant chunks of our lives trying to improve it. If we didn’t care, there’d be pop-up ads and unsolicited sales offers running rampant within the community…you’d be amazed at home many seedy advertising and marketing offers we get.
So We Charge For Stuff
We try to make it cooler to be a blogger, which is where the Blog Tour idea came from along with other partnerships on our Events. We know they aren’t all perfect for everyone, but prizes/opportunities/offers like those are being offered to all kinds of bloggers and we think personal bloggers deserve them too. Rather than let every joker who wants to spam the whole network with their pitch, we try to act as a reasonable middle man. Charging some sort of fee to engage with the whole community weeds out the spammers, and lets us keep the network costs covered and some of our time compensated.
That being said, the Gift Store is the first application/feature added to our platform that has commerce revenue sharing embedded in it. We’re not even sure we’ll keep the Gift Store…initial feedback was somewhat negative, although people are starting to give one another quite a few gifts (hundreds so far!). Either way, the Gifts feature wasn’t added to sneak revenue out of you guys…I personally promise that. The revenue sharing capability is a nice feature, but we haven’t decided if or how we’ll manage it.
Why The Post?
The reason is simple…we’re not trying to hide anything from you. We want you to understand why we do certain things and we want your feedback on the community.
