YouSayToo review - Revenue sharing secrets exposed

Update:  I was recently contacted by the YouSayToo team and they nicely explained in detail about some of the open ended points and some which were misleading. I have updated the post accordingly...

On account of some of the points brought into light by my previous post What no one told you about YouSayToo - Top 10 list one of my blog followers apparently commented on JadeDragon's YST review raising questions over them. This led to a healthy discussion amongst us which was indeed very informative and I thought I should share the information with all my followers. I'll just share the main highlights of the discussion else the post would unnecessarily grow very large:

#1 50% revenue sharing with only for 2+ rating user with everyone:
This is from the YouSayToo faq (Update: This is very old info, back when we had user ratings and users could rate posts from -10 to +10. All information that was once provided on that page is irrelevant now. You should consult our Terms of Use for current information http://www.yousaytoo.com/about/terms.). But it hasn't been implemented yet apparently.
Ironically, this rule has been there on the site since 10th May 2007 (checked using Internet Archive Wayback Machine), but hasn't been implemented yet. So the rating system isn't new, just never implemented. There is no documentation anywhere as to how the users will be rated -

• Frequency of posting? 
• Content rating by YST users?

Another point ofcourse might be that they don't want to implement till the platform gets populated. Once they get some good(huge?) no. of users (yeah, good is a relative term, but still), then they would probably go ahead with this and say that it was documented all the time.

#2 Old blogs not imported?
JadeDragon: "YST works off your RSS feed. Your RSS feed only spits out new posts"
My argument: "Agreed that RSS feeds only spits new posts but since they already have the mechanism in place to count the number of words in your previous posts(else it doesn’t accept the blog), building a mechanism to import previous posts shouldn’t be that tough."

#3. Backlink on our blog before associating with YST
JadeDragon: "It is a security measure. Only the blog owner has the ability to add that YST backlink to a blog. If they did not have this rule people could go around the web adding everyone elses blog to YST and making the adsense share with no more effort"
Me: "Agreed! I missed out that point of view. What I initially thought is that those who RSS others' blog will risk their adsense account but your point makes more sense."


#4. Profile links indexing by search engines
JadeDragon: "I’ve seen the profile link indexed when checking backlinks."
Me: Again, YST faqs mention that they aren't.
JadeDragon: "I can’t quite understand the “no index” of links from your profile. Maybe they mean “no follow” because the profile pages surely get indexed. Strange indeed."




I hope that this discussion has been informative to you. The main motive is just to bring in front all the available information for you and thus keep you updated.

Where to place YouSayToo ad exchange so that it does not drive away your blog traffic

This post discussed the 10 facts about YouSayToo that you might not have been told before, mainly the negative points that you should worry about since everyone has talked a lot about the positive points. While I also mentioned a quick list of 10 positive points, I missed out on one major advantage that YouSayToo can have for the not-so-popular blogs - "YouSayToo Ad banner exchange application".

The ad banner exchange application gives you an opportunity to advertise your blogs on other such similar blogs which have accepted to participate in the ad exchange program. And you will get the same amount of impressions on others' blogs as much you are able to generate on your blog. Moreover, there is some bonus for generated clicks and impressions on these ads which link to others' blogs.

When you are not even being paid for that ad, the last thing you'd want your user to to do is exit your blog and go to someone else's blog from an ad on your blog. This is in addition to the YouSayToo backlink that you were forced to put on your blog at the beginning before associating your blog with YouSayToo. This might even force you to place those ads at some corner of your blog or probably hide the ad under some hood where it isn't visible. Fair enough! But an impression for impression exchange is really worth.

Where should you place YouSayToo ad on your blog?
The bottom-most part of your blog might be your best bet to place the "forced" YouSayToo ads. But then, if you place it just after your article gets over, that might be the most obvious link a user will click since the chain of thoughts of the user might be "Ok, now I'm done reading this article, what to do?" He reads on to the YouSayToo ad immediately next to the article. And all your efforts to hide the ad gone down in a moment(while doing what you thought was the best).

So not placing the ad "immediately" after your post is the key here. In between, you probably can place a related article of yours or popular posts or similar. This will result in greater probability of the user continuing with your blogs rather than bouncing away to someone else's blog based on the YouSayToo ad.

Of course, this is just one suggestion. You can check out my implementation of this here.
If you have any better ideas/suggestions, please let me know through the comments section below.