I should have gotten more suspicious when last month a member with email account hosted at dealspl.us domain registered at Buxr and started submitting deals and participating in Buxr’s daily life as a normal member would. This was most likely a DealsPlus employee checking out the website but at that time I didn’t care. I even allowed them to win a prize when one of the deals they submitted suddenly got popular with Buxr community! :-)
That competitor’s spying as it turns out wasn’t a coincidence. My friend emailed me last week with this link. The third popular deal site (by Alexa) has just launched Money Makers which is a cash incentive program for deal submitters, something Buxr has offered to its members for 2 years now. Unlike Buxr however, the team at DealsPlus decided not to re-invent the bicycle and went with the well established approach that blog networks like Gawker and Weblogs use to pay their writers.
The revenue is based on page views, the more page views the deal receives the more revenue the submitter gets. Currently the rate is set at $3 per 1000 page views for deals and $10 per 1000 link clicks for coupon submissions. Yes, the coupon page views are not really page views, they are clicks. This is done so because DealsPlus rolls all same store coupons into one page and there is no way to calculate the page views separately for each coupon submission.
We will pay you $10 for every 1,000 views your coupon receives. In this case, a view is not simply a visit to a store page where your coupon is displayed. Users will need to click on your specific coupon from the dealspl.us Coupon page, Today’s Top Coupons, a daily dealspl.us email, or any place where you’ve shared a link to your coupon.
Can you get rich submitting deals for $3 per 1000 page view? Probably not. Can you make some side cash? Yes, but the amount depends on how well your deals fare on DealsPlus and how popular they get. In addition any visitors you yourself bring to your deal pages will help as well. From the Money Makers tips page:
Share your deals and coupons on blogs, websites, Twitter and Facebook. The more you share your links, the more likely your deals and coupons are to turn up in search engine results (SEO), and the more money you’ll make!
Let’s suppose your deal does get picked up by search. For how long will it keep making money? According to the FAQ, each page view will bring you some revenue for a period of up to one year, or until it is updated (re-submitted) twice by another member or admin. Coupons, unlike deals, also stop bringing revenue when they expire.
But still, is $3 per 1000 page views a lot? How much can you make with this program? Someone started a thread in the DealsPlus community board asking this same question. I wonder if anyone answers… I know a personal finance blog that pays writers $5 per 1000 page views. Writing an article takes much longer than submitting a deal however but articles can potentially gather many more page views than deals, so it is really hard to compare and you will have to give it a try to find out for yourself.
And the last thing, the Money Makers program is open to DealsPlus members who have a reputation of 100 or more, so you will need to do some homework before you can start making money with your deals. ;-)
Not very encouraging news from that discussion thread I linked. Here is the most informative answer to the question “how much have you made”:
“$11.10 in 10 days. 17 cents for profile views. 19 cents for deal updates (updates almost invariably disappeared into the search pages instead of returning to the listings page, so totals were low there.)
That leaves $10.74 for 3579 views of the roughly 100 fresh deals submitted. 2 were front paged – Kinect got 1310 views and Swype (which was actually a deal I updated but got credit for submitting) got 712 views. So that leaves 1557 views for the remaining deals.
Money-wise, for the 2 front-paged deals, it comes out to $6.07 total leaving $4.67 for the remaining 100. Say $3 each for a front-paged deal and a nickel apiece for the others. “