Are you looking to make a name for yourself as a blogger, but you don’t know where to begin? Sure, you could start your own blog and work hard on growing a readership, but another option for you to consider would be signing up for an account on BloggersBase.
Dan Barak, a long time fan of John Chow dot Com, is one of the masterminds behind this “content discovery platform” and he ordered this review to let all of you know about it. Are you interested in “offering quality over quantity”?
Multiple Bloggers with Multiple Posts
In short, BloggersBase takes on the form of an online magazine, comprised of several multi-authored blogs. Each of these blogs focuses on a certain topic area, like entertainment or world affairs, and then people can submit their posts to it.
Naturally, not every submission can be published and that’s where the “algorithm-enhanced crowd wisdom” moderation comes into play. Bloggers have to compete for exposure and it’s based largely on a voting system. The blog competition system sounds fairly complex, but that helps to ensure that only the best work gets featured.
What Can I Gain from BloggersBase?
Some bloggers may be motivated simply to make a name for themselves, willing to provide unique content to BloggersBase for the price of zero dollars and zero cents. Personally, since I write for a living, I’d want to get paid.
BloggersBase does not pay its contributors directly for every post they submit. Instead, the primary payment is through a reward system. The competition side gets you published and then the rewards get you paid.
Each week, BloggersBase pays $40 to the top blogger co-authoring the surface blog. Second place gets $10. Considering the amount of content that BloggersBase is able to get, it seems that they are getting a steal of a deal at just $50 a week.
Every contributing writer gets a profile page. Shown above is the profile for amabaie, the top blogger on BloggersBase at the time this review was written. This is based on points, both as a reader and as a writer. You earn points for submitting quality posts and participating in the BloggersBase community.
A Self-Sustaining Business Model
If BloggersBase is able to attract enough writers, it should have no problem being able to sustain itself in terms of new content. If you choose to sign up and you want to submit your blog posts, you don’t have to do it manually and you don’t even need the post to be completely original. There is an RSS-In feature that imports posts from your external blog. Think of BloggersBase as another venue to promote yourself.
It could be because the site is still in beta, but there isn’t much going on with BloggersBase in terms of monetization. On the main page, a small square AdSense block has been cleverly integrated among the rest of the content. There is also a skyscraper ad at the bottom of the sidebar and a banner at the end of each post.
Realistically, there really isn’t anything stopping the contributing bloggers from monetizing their own posts using affiliate links, but that doesn’t feed into the revenue of BloggersBase. Moving forward, the online magazine would need to expand its monetization portfolio.
Is It More Than Just an Aggregator?
I’ve seen a couple of these “collaborative blog” efforts pop up before. Some of them offer a 50/50 AdSense split. Some don’t pay the writers at all. BloggersBase falls somewhere in between with its competition and reward system. As mentioned earlier, if BloggersBase is able to attract enough writers who consistently submit quality content, they could have some great meta-blogs on their hands. You’ve got sections on everything from Lifestyle to Special Events, Technology to Politics.
The competition adds a unique dynamic, but I’d think that the weekly possibility of $40 is not enough to entice the best of writers. Then again, people update their Twitter and Facebook accounts without any expectation of monetary compensation. The site itself is reasonably pleasing to the eye, but with so much on the front page of each “blog”, it can look very cluttered as well.
BloggersBase is an interesting concept and it could be more than a simple aggregator. It all depends on the quality of writers it attracts.
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