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Get paid for posts? Social networking's new twist

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San Francisco - Facebook and most other social networks are built on the premise that just about everything should be shared - except the money those posts produce.

At least two services are trying to change that.

Bubblews, a social network that came out of an extended test phase last week, pays users for posts that attract traffic and advertisers.

Another company, Bonzo Me, has been doing something similar since early July.

"I just feel like everyone on social networks has been taken advantage of for long enough," says Michael Nusbaum, a New Jersey surgeon who created Bonzo Me.

"Facebook has been making a ton of money and the people providing the content aren't getting anything."

Bonzo Me is paying its users up to 80% of its ad revenue for the most popular posts.

Day job

Bubblews' compensation formula is more complex.

It's based on the number of times that each post is clicked on or provokes some other kind of networking activity. To start, the payments are expected to translate into just a penny per view, comment or like.

Bubblews plans to pay its users in $50 increments, meaning it could take a while for most users to qualify for their first paycheck unless they post material that goes viral.

"No one should come to our site in anticipation of being able to quit their day job," Bubblews CEO Arvind Dixit says.

"We are, however, trying to be fair with our users. Social networks don't have to be places where you feel like you're being exploited."

Bubblews is also trying to make its service worthwhile for users by encouraging deeper, thoughtful posts instead of musings about trifling subjects. To do that, it requires each post to span at least 400 characters, or roughly the opening two paragraphs of this story.

Marketing messages

Though Facebook is by far the largest social network, it has a history of irking users. People have complained when Facebook changed privacy settings in ways that exposed posts to a wider audience. They have criticised Facebook for circulating ads containing endorsements from users who didn't authorise the marketing messages.

More recently, people were upset over a 2012 experiment in which Facebook manipulated the accounts of about 700 000 users to analyse how their moods were affected by the emotional tenor of the posts flowing through their pages. Facebook apologised.

Despite the occasional uproar, Facebook has been thriving while feeding off the free content of its nearly 1.3 billion users.


The Menlo Park, California, company now has a market value of $175bn and CEO Mark Zuckerberg ranks among the world's wealthiest people with a fortune of about $30bn, based on the latest estimates from Forbes magazine.


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