High expectations from the coming Squidoo payment

If you're a Squidoo lensmaster, what do you expect from this coming payment? It was promised to occur on March 9 or some days later - most probably in the next few hours!

Here is what I expect - based on the rules set in the TOS, further explained in the FAQ and SquidU, as well as on the fact that during January 2007 (the pay is for that month) I had 6 well-established lenses, with nice traffic, some of them even had sales and were blogged about:

1/ I should get "attributable revenue" - money earned that can be directly tracked to each of my lenses, coming from sales made through Squidoo affiliate links (e.g., Amazon, ebay). I would like to know how much of that revenue each of my lenses earned;
2/ I should get my share in the "pooled revenue" - revenue that can't be directly attributable by the HQ to particular lenses, but is being earned:
a/ from selling sponsorship ads on a Search results page - that's what it says in TOS, but I think it's just part of Adsense revenue that comes from clicks on Google ads that appear not only on search results pages, but also on every lens (if the lens is maxed) and b/ by Squidoo participation in affiliate programs that pay Squidoo income based on overall performance (nobody ever explained what such programs are).

I just can't wait for the payment announcement. Who knows, maybe this will the most important day in the modern Squidoo history, when we finally get some Adsense income... Well, that's what Lewis - January's Most Profitable Lensmaster - wrote:

"I am OFFICIALLY the most profitable lensmaster this month (adsense, and money-maker-module sales)."

And maybe soon we'll get other promised goodies - like better Stats and quarterly Squidoo numbers (so that everybody could see exactly how much money was distributed to lensmasters and to charity - TOS, p. 23).

Only time will tell if I'm a dreamer, but really - we, the lensmasters, are co-operators and we are owed those things!

By the way, in my newest lens - "Making Money With Squidoo" - I try to show the rules and policies that relate to making money by creating and working on Squidoo lenses. Very interesting stuff, I highly recommend reading it - the earlier, the better.

Ilona Zuzalek
Squidoo Lensranking - How Important It Is And How To Make It Better
The Beatles Songs - My Favorite Kind Of Music

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There is something wrong with the new algorithm

The latest Top 100 by LensRank really looks very strange - it's so hard to find there any interesting lens with great content and layout. Instead, it is dominated by lenses on handbags, tattoos and free downloads.

Yes, free downloads appear to replace the videosense and affiliate marketing lenses. There are about 30 of them - about downloading music, videos, psp games, movies, etc.

I noticed that new trend while looking in the morning at the current ranking. In fact, I got shocked - all of my lenses went down and I had no lens in the Top 100 by LensRank!

I would accept that, because it is possible with growing competition, however I realized that on every lens the update date was described as: "Updated more than a week ago"!

It wasn't true, because I updated all of them 2 days before and the actual date was being showed correctly on the Dashboard. I sent a bug report and got confirmation of receipt, but nothing happened during the day - the update dates didn't change (only after I updated the lenses) and the LensRanks were not corrected.

A number of people were complaining in the Lounge, so I decided to do some analysis of the current situation in the Squidoo rankings.

The results were shocking!

Imagine that profitability is no longer the most important factor. I have never had any problem with it being a significant ingredient in the LensRank formula because Squidoo needs revenue in order to exist, we want to earn money for the charities and we also want to be rewarded for our work.

However, after this tweak, only 24 (!) lenses from Top 100 Most Profitable are also on the Top 100 by LensRank. This is much, much lower than before. I think it's a bad decision, because Squidoo will get less money for charities and lensmasters will not be rewarded as much as before for being creative to find ways to earn money. It simply will have discouraging effect.

But, I did even more analysis and I found Gil's new magic ingredient... His silver bullet this time is traffic!

Yes, by looking at the less known Top 100 Most Visited (most traffic) - http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses/traffic I found out that 67 - i.e. every two out of three lenses from that list - made it to the Top 100 by Lensrank. It obviously means that that the latest tweak gives the biggest importance to traffic.

I think it is not acceptable, because it is one of the factors that can be very easily manipulated and we had examples of that in the past.

I'm still waiting for full response to my bug report as apparently something was wrong and all of my ranks were lowered because of that. By the way, a look at the Dashboard also confirmed that the traffic is very important now, as my lenses (all updated on the same day) were listed in the reverse order based on the traffic for the last 7 days.

Ilona Zuzalek
Squidoo Lensranking - How Important It Is And How To Make It Better
The Beatles Songs - My Favorite Kind Of Music

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