I am more of a reader than a writer here, especially in the background quietly present. Kind of like I am in real life. A little invisible, even.
I watch, observe, study, think too much, keep my opinion to myself, draw conclusions.
Almost four years I've been doing this on Yoors. Four years in which I occasionally write a blog, because writing sometimes does good. Because at least, entrusted to the paper, it can leave my head.
In the first 3.5 years, I never reached the payout threshold. Not because it was unattainable. It's more because I didn't strive for it. I personally don't care about ten euros more or less. I won't eat any more or less bread on it. Moreover, I do not have the time and the desire to write a lot of blogs. What personally interested me was to check my statistics from time to time. There you can see how many unique times your blog has been viewed. Milestones yielded points, so money. With personalised blogs, you won't get thousands of views. But like I said, I just wrote off a little bit, to notice that 80 people were watching that blog anyway. I didn't earn 100 yps with that, but I didn't have to. There were 80 people who found something about my blog that was worth checking out.
Eighty views, sometimes five comments, but because those views and reactions were not rewarded, they were real. They had value. At least people who responded had read the blog. No one wrote a meaningless reaction in the hope that they would be rewarded for it. No one visited the blog because they could earn something from it.
In the last few months, since the abolition of the milestones and thus earning on pageviews, I have earned more than double the money I've earned in recent years. I wrote 2 to 4 blogs, including 2 sixwords. And I posted a comment here and there, handing out hearts and paying for a few blogs. I didn't go to great lengths to rake money in. The threshold has been reached, but I prefer to reward good blogs with it. The tenner's gonna find its way inside Yoors.
Isn't that the original purpose of the hearts and boosters? If you like something, reward the maker.
What do I notice? If there are large boosters attached to it, traffic increases. When the prize pool was worth it in November, there were massive blogs. That was the intention, too. But if you voted for someone, you suddenly got messages in your inbox from a few others to vote on their blog, so that they came for the others anyway. Then I can see the image of people trampling others for that one piece of gold that fell off the stagecoach. I sometimes get posts in the sense of: “If you vote and respond on my blog, you'll earn 55 yps.” Or, “I'm in the pool music. Support me.” When there were no boosters, I rarely received messages in my inbox.
So my question is, “What is the real value of a Yoors heart?” When is a blog good? And then I'm not talking about what is a valuable blog for me or for you: a picture can be beautiful, a drawing too. One sentence can replace a thousand words. What touches me may seem worthless to you. That's not what it's about.
But again, when is a blog good?
What if he has 28 hearts and 40 page views, all by Year members himself? And where are these hundreds, or thousands of other members? How many potential visitors are here anyway? I see the same voters passing through, only occasionally another one.
Or if the blog has one heart, only achieves 5,000 page views?
And what is the most valuable for a site like Yoors? 30 hearts on a blog? Or 50,000 views on the global web?
Are those blogs with many hearts going viral? Do they reach the world outside of Yoors? And if pageviews are no longer feasible, how long is it feasible to provide all those booster and heart hunters with income when there is no investment? Because if I see some people working here, with a blog with 15 hearts in every booster pool, in one day, should they raise hundreds of euros that they would never get with pageviews? How many times are those well-running blogs with dozens of hearts actually watched? And most importantly, are they really read too? Judging by some reactions, not really. Surely some reactions are only in the hope of being able to catch a grain?
And one last question, before I leave the discussion to you: what is the long-term goal of the creators of Yoors? Playing with the big ones, like Facebook and Twitter, but with a friendlier concept? Make Yoors a self-supporting system in which the money is moved from person one to person two? After all, this is not a charity, but a company.
Just some thoughts of my way after weeks of observation. Enter for discussion. I am interested in the number of real page views and the real reactions among themselves.
And especially the question: “What is the value of a Yoors heart really, do you think?”
