AC Page Views and Up-Front Payments: How They Work Over the Life Cycle of an Associated Content CP

When I go out and read the forums, there are a lot of people obsessing about increasing their up-front payments, but not worrying so much about keywording or article promotion. The more I write for AC, the more this doesn't make sense to me. Instead, a long-term point of view, figuring in your pageviews over time and long-term strategies for increasing your audience, give you much more money for your work than making that quick buck right now.

I'm developing a pageview tracking spreadsheet (which after I have it fully automated I will share with everyone) and it is helping me get a realistic perspective on how important PVs really are in the long run. Here are a few of the things I've figured out from it, as well as a lot of wisdom I've gleaned from folks out on the forums (thanks, guys!).

Lifecycle of a CP - The Beginner

There are three phases of CP development, especially with the advent of the upfront+bonus payment system: beginner, adolescent, and advanced. In the beginner phase, up to about clout 3, the upfront payments are critical. You may be getting $5 for an article that gets you a dollar in page views. Most of your income at this level comes from your up-front payments, not your PVs.

For instance, let's say you really get moving on your first month (relatively speaking). You write 12 ordinary articles and manage to get paid for three news articles as well (more about fast pageviews than the upfront $5 payment). For the sake of simplicity, let's say you get paid $5 for each of these, for a total of $75.

Your PVs, of course, are anemic. You're still learning about keywording, you don't have a social network yet, and your articles average about 100 PVs each for the whole month, for a total of - 1500 PVs. That gives you a whopping bonus of $2.25. Your up-front payment is many times this, and at this point seems much more important.

$75.00 > $2.25

Lifecycle of a CP - The Adolescent CP

Most CPs who are really focusing on building a career at AC will make a clout 4 within a month or so; this is an adolescent CP. The typical clout 4 CP has a minimum of ten articles with decent pageviews of around a hundred each.

This is important. Now you have a body of work to build upon. Every article you have written in the past will be bringing you PV dollars - whether you do anything to promote it or not. This is where you really want to pay attention to the articles that do well.

So let's say you're an average adolescent CP. You have a clout 5, and you have 45 articles right now in your pocket. They don't do as well now as when they were new, averaging about 50 PVs a month each. You're also still writing about fifteen new articles a month.

That's the math part. But you have done some other things. You've learned how keywords work, and your new articles show it; they do a little better each time. So once the initial flurry of PVs settles down on your new articles, you're seeing them average 60 PVs a month; it doesn't sound like a huge difference, but that's 20%.

You have also developed a network of friends in AC itself. You have commented on other articles, you've made the front page at least once either through ratings or through having a featured article, and you are making friends in the forum. This means you have people who know you exist and who come to your articles.

You've also figured out the social networking tools: the way Digg works, how to get friends and family to subscribe to you, how to put an RSS feed on your own blog and homepage.

And you have developed a specialty. I don't specialize personally; I'm interested in far too many things. But we have some excellent specializers here: music, childbirth, practical medicine, parenting, travel, each category has its own outstanding CP or CP group working on it. I recommend specializing in this manner. You gain a following among the CP community, you're more likely to get subscribers you haven't contacted yourself, and you may even get outside subscribers who groove to your stuff.

So, you've:

- Created a body of work

- Created a loyal body of fans within and without AC

- Started using keywords right

- Learned how to use social networking tools

- Carved out your own niche with a specialty

Now look at the math. Your regular writing is still bringing you the original amount outlined in your Beginner cycle: $5 x 15 = $75 a month, up front. But your pageviews for the first few days of your articles are way up; you're starting to see an average of closer to 150 PVs per month, with an occasional really high one that goes through the roof. So figure your PV bonus for these fifteen articles: 15 x 150 = 2250 PVs x $1.50/1000 = $3.38.

But you also have a PV bonus for all your other articles, at about 50 PVs each every month: 45 * 50 = 2250 PVs x $1.50/1000 = $3.38 - your old articles bring in as much of a bonus as all your new articles!

Now your income is: $75 upfront

$3.38 new article PV

$3.38 old article PV

Your upfront payments are still by far the largest piece of your income. But instead of being about 20 times the total of your PV bonus, these payments are only 10 times the total of your PV bonus - and this has happened in about three months! In the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot of time.

Lifecycle of a CP: The Advanced CP

Once a CP reaches about a clout 9, they can be called advanced. (Full disclosure: at the writing of this, I have a clout 7 that will be a clout 8 with the next PV update -- so I still consider myself to be an adolescent.) This CP has a significant body of work. He or she is probably sitting on about 200 old articles, each of which still draws PVs. Because the later articles are keyworded better, they draw more PVs than his first new articles did.

As an advanced CP, you have also learned which articles draw great PVs and which articles do not. This has helped you to get your average PVs for older articles up to about 70 per month overall. This doesn't sound like a lot - until you look at the whole body of work. 70 x 200 = 14,000 PVs a month.

Now, your up-front payments have also gone up marginally. You're a better writer, you keyword better, you have good pageviews due in part to your body of fans, and really everything is better. Your new articles generally pull an audience averaging 300 PVs per article in the first month, with some doing really really well.

So now your monthly income looks like this:

15 articles x $6 = $90

PVs for new articles - 300 PVs x 15 = 4500 PVs x $1.50/1000 = $6.75

PVs for old articles - 70 PVs x 200 articles = 14,000 PVs x $1.50/1000 = $21

Your PV bonus, even with a significant increase in the up-front payments, has grown to nearly a third of your up-front payments. That is significant

You can see how this winds up working. Your body of work grows steadily with your faithful one-article-every-other-day pace. You will always get that PV bonus payment as long as you remain marginally active at AC. It's exactly like an investment, in this respect.

And you've achieved your clout 9, at the referenced slow pace, in just over a year.

You Want To Make A Living As A CP

No one can live on about $120 a month, of course. This is why many CPs accelerate this path, setting goals to write about 4 articles per day. This way, the body of work increases much more rapidly.

But is this the best way to do things? If you read the above lifecycle carefully, you will have noticed that there's more to writing for AC than just writing articles. You have to understand keywording. You need a fan base. You need to learn how to use the social networking tools and keep up with new developments at AC.

You also need to take the time to track your articles, to set them up properly in Digg etc., and to develop great new ideas for articles that are not only fun to write but that also bring you pageviews. In order to keep getting paid for articles, you need to master any grammatical problems you've had in the past, and learn how to write engaging and informative articles without sacrificing your keywording. This is a specialized skill; don't let anyone tell you otherwise!

There's an additional problem, as several CPs have found out to their chagrin in the last several months. If you write a dozen articles a day and the PVs don't perform as they should, AC will review your account and you may be suspended from pay because your articles have performed poorly.

And, really, why shouldn't they? AC is a business, not a writers' charity. Just like any other business, they have to have a decent return on investment. They invest money in creating the tools you use to create your articles, and then they invest more money in paying you and others up-front for content. Their income is completely dependent upon your page views.

Like any other business, if the income from an investment does not exceed the amount invested, they will have to get rid of that investment. You are an investment. Your performance, gauged in pageviews -- not, alas, writing quality -- is what determines your worth to AC.

How Do You Gauge Your Own Value?

A lot of people have been running around trying to identify the magic number of PVs required to keep getting up-front payments at AC. From what I have read about Google Adsense and other advertising programs AC uses, (and I may be totally off-base here, so commenters, correct me please) they can expect to make between 3-5 cents per thousand pageviews if your ads run properly (though certain really hot topics can make more). This means they are giving you back, in bonus money, half the minimum amount of cash they anticipate making on your article. Until you have made double your up-front payment, you are not at break-even point.

My personal gauge of success: if my article makes (or clearly will be making) twice what I'm paid up-front, I should be okay. If it makes triple, I know I'm fine. Why triple? Because what AC pays me is not all the costs it incurs. (IMPORTANT: this is over the whole lifetime of the article, not just what it's made in the last three months! Keep it in perspective.)

They also have to pay their own advertising costs, doing-business costs (even if it really is Michael's and Luke's moms' basements they're running AC out of, as alleged by certain AC conspiracy theorists, those servers cost money!) and - the cost of up-front payments to CPs who are NOT pulling in the requisite amount of pageviews.

Something to think about: when CPs don't make their PVs, it will cost you money if they don't cut those CPs loose.

Oh, and they have to make a profit to buy big boss Luke's Drew Carey glasses and hairdo.

Your little articles, one by one, pay for all this.

My Ultimate Advice

My advice: don't quit your day job, especially when you start. Take it slow during your first month or two. Learn all the stuff outlined in the beginner and adolescent stages, and don't try to write tons and tons until you have mastered all those basic pieces of information.

As you grow more comfortable, as your bonuses grow, you can start writing more, secure in the knowledge that you are now bringing in enough pageviews with your articles that you won't be suddenly suspended. If, by the time you reach a clout 8, you are writing six or seven articles a day, you should be fine.

Even with that rate of writing, you're still not looking at a comfortable living for a while, and maybe not even an uncomfortable living. But you have a nice second income, and for stay-at-home moms and students, you have a truly livable wage.

How long til you have a good income from residual PVs? It depends on the CP. If you write well-keyworded, easily-searchable evergreen content, it might be a thousand articles (at 100 PVs a month each, that's $150; if you're really good at keywording and have articles, like one of mine, that bring in 3000 PVs/month, well, you can do the math). Remember, those residual PVs are, for all intents and purposes, free money. You have already invested the time and work required to develop them. All you have to do is sit there and spend the money.