http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7153637.stm

Social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace make 20 millions dollars a month selling advertising space on their website. Yet, Facebook’s 50 million members do not benefit from any of the company’s earnings. Now, there is a social networking website, called Yuwie, that shares more than half of its advertising revenue with its members. Yuwie was launched in July, 2007 and already has over a half a million members. It is completely free to join. You earn money when people view any of your pages within the site, a pay-per-click payment scheme. Also, if you invite other people to join and they mention you as their referral, you earn a percentage of their earnings.

Here is how earning money through Yuwie works. If you refer some friends, who refer some more friends and you take this 10 levels down, you get a certain percentage of their earnings. Here are the percentages that you would earn:

Level          Your %

You             10%

Level 1       10%

Level 2       10%

Level 3         4%

Level 4         4%

Level 5         4%

Level 6         4%

Level 7         4%

Level 8       10%

Level 9       10%

Level 10     30%

These values are the percentages of the RSR (revenue sharing rate) that you would earn at each level. Lets assume that the month’s RSR is $0.50 per 1000 clicks. (The RSR is variable from month to month.) This would imply that you would earn 10% of that, or $0.05 for every 1000 clicks. But, you also earn a percentage of the RSR on your referrals’ clicks. Therefore, if you had a full referral tree of just three people referring three people all the way down 10 levels, you would have over 88,000 people in your referral tree and you could have an earning potential of over $10,000 for that month.

Levels     Referrals     Earnings

1               3                   $0.15

2               9                   $0.45

3               27                 $0.54

4               81                 $1.62

5               243               $4.86

6               729               $14.58

7               2,187            $43.74

8               6,561           $328

9               19,683         $984

10             59,049        $8,857

Totals       88,572        $10,235

To learn more about Yuwie in greater detail, you can watch this introduction video here: http://ww3.yuwie.com/yuwie.asp?r=353535

I thought the concept of earning money for social networking was a novel and ingenious idea. We mentioned in class that websites make a killing on advertising, yet none of it is shared with the users of the web pages. Millions of people spend a lot of time on their Facebook profiles and writing blogs and only ever get self-satisfaction out of it. It is a very lucrative business to charge advertisers for space, especially on a social networking website that gets millions of hits per day. If the website owners are willing to share the wealth, they gain additional profit from the surge in popularity, and everybody wins.