You may or may not have heard that many gay blogs have shut down recently including Queerty.   While there are many standing by to take its place they are mostly naive in the fact that most blogs do not make an income and sometimes cannot afford to keep up with their web hosting or keep on the lights.   I have seen many different suggestions on this and have tried so many things myself.     The Bilerico Project recently ran an interesting post just days before Queerty’s departure threatening to take away their blog because of the same problem. With people turning more to the corporate owned blogs (even Huffington Post is owned by Time Warner / AOL).

This may be partially due to Social Media’s toll on our attention span.   People are more likely to comment and engage with their Facebook wall and never leave to click on the actual site to give the writer feedback.   One thing about the QueerCents community is it has been fortunate in the amount of engagement you see on the blog.   We definitely want to keep that up but at the same time spread the word and be able to compete against the corporate guys.   Let’s join Social Media not fight it.

Trying to think of ways to monetize writers and came up with something new I thought why not pay not based on the traffic of the page or the ads clicked but by how many Tweets and/or Facebook likes.   I thought that one way to pay writers is to use social media as a guide.   It does nothing for the site to pay for a post then get no traffic and maybe less than 1 percent of the time does someone ever click a banner or Google ad but some advertising is based on page views so this could help everyone and be a win-win situation.

Using Social media as terms for payment?
I was recently intrigued when I stumbled to a site “Pay With a Tweet.”   This idea just seemed really fun to me to be able to tweet about something then you get a a free download or something for sharing.   This could be used in the same way to help with bloggers.     The writer would get an initial amount for the article then $.50 for each Tweet and/or Facebook post or like up to 20 then $.25 cents after that almost unlimited. The maximum amount would be around $350 per post.

I am interested to hear what everyone thinks of this…