Can You Make a Million on Newsbreak?

And a few notes about what I’m learning so far

Early this morning I got a note from Illumination’s Dr Mehmet Yildiz to write about Newsbreak, so here goes.

Last night I rolled past the 1m impressions mark, with more than 46k page views and close to 800 followers. The chart of my analytics looks like a heart rate monitor of a guy who flatlined and on occasion, someone uses a defibrillator to revive him:

I also got paid my second thousand this past week, as promised to those of us early adopters.

Here are some of the lessons I’m learning from my experience as well as input from others.

Sure as shit is a roller coaster ride, which is evidenced by the chart, above. One day I have thousands of folks, lots of (usually ugly, racist, political) comments, then I fall off a cliff as though trying to ride a thermal that isn’t there.

I have spent umpteen hours rewriting titles that flew high on Medium, and crashed spectacularly on Newsbreak. That’s actually supremely useful.

I am still struggling to understand WTF is going on here. And, kindly, the payoff isn’t great, but it sure is a lot better than the pittance I am now earning on Medium. So. To that:

1. YES. I scrape my best performing Medium articles to Newsbreak, and with some minor adjustments, they do just fine. The big adjustment that consumes my time is the title rewrite. My social media guys advises: give it two rewrites then MOVE ON. He’s right. Your piece may have gone gangbusters on Medium but that is NOT a predictor of success on Newsbreak. That said, I have seen time and time again that if I head into more click-baity territory, I get more eyeballs.
2. NO, we cannot link to anyone, unless it’s a very innocent site, that doesn’t in the least bit demonstrate competition with Newsbreak. If I link to Pocket or any other writer’s site, the story sits, and sits, and sits. Until I remove the link. Or it gets denied outright.
3. YES, I’ve had to clean up my profanity. Where I am able to get away with my Army-inspired language on Medium, that doesn’t fly. Funny how that doesn’t seem to apply to the commenters.
4. As other writers have pointed out, the comments are awful. Just….sewage awful. One Karen (and in this case boy did she earn it) posted this ugly comment right next to her blonde, blue-eyed ugly face: “Well at least I don’t have to live next to Blacks!” I can erase, but not block. Pity that. You have to go through with a Brillo pad to clean this shit out. I’ve had 170 comments, most have been deleted. Sigh. Since folks can’t highlight, it’s hard to tell what’s getting people to give you page views.
5. Lotsa people on Newsbreak seeking to do two things: troll and bitch without reading your piece. Look, we get that on Medium as well, but on Newsbreak it’s a high art, apparently. If that gets under your skin, do not write for Newsbreak. It’s a widespread virus over there. At least on Medium it’s not as common, as Medium is a place for readers by writers (if you remove the Ponzi get rich quick bullshit) which Newsbreak isn’t. Not really. Not yet and perhaps not ever.
6. I do not and will NEVER promote and link my shit solely to Newsbreak. Look. It’s a Chinese company. The Chinese know technology better than most of the rest of the world. There are going to be some very strict limitations on what we can earn, and the payment plan exists to do the following: a) motivate us to write: b)incentivize us to write the way THEY want us to write; c) incentivize us to do all the hard marketing work to get eyeballs on THEIR site, not our private websites; d) make sure that what we do serves them, only them, and always only them, which is the worst kind of control over our creative gifts. You can spend an enormous amount of your valuable time and effort in recruitment mode to earn Newsbreak pennies, which, kindly, is no different than Amway. You do all the work for your upline, they rake in the dollars. The incentives have a very hard stop for you and me, and we are doing all the work. That sound like a good deal to you? Um…..NO. Stay with me here.
7. Much of how we receive incentives is based on how hard we work to get other writers to work for Newsbreak, how much we push people in our social networks to read Newsbreak, you get it. In other words, we are given perhaps a grand a month or a little more to do, en masse, what professional SEO folks are paid a great deal of money to do. Did you sign up for that? I didn’t.
8. The Content Value score they created is bogus, in that they don’t really inform you how it’s used or how your material is weighted. It’s as clear as a piece of granite, and as I’ve said elsewhere, most of us have found a steep inverse relationship between their arbitrary CV score and the number of views and page visits. It seems then that the payment system almost cancels itself out because of that. The CV score means you write for the Chinese and what they want (lots of local content, which I don’t do), page views means you’re writing for what the audience wants. Go figure.
9. The PRIMARY reason I am on Newsbreak is to replace the income that Medium ripped off. These days a grand a month is a whole lot better than less than half that, which is what I make on Medium today with almost three times the followers (who largely can no longer find my work) than I had this time last year making five times that amount. So if you choose to write for Newsbreak, be very clear about why. Because the way I see it and the way that my very savvy social media buddy explains it, Newsbreak is effectively hiring us like sweat labor to do all the writing, marketing and promoting for them for just a tiny bit more than Medium while imprisoning our creativity and ensuring that we can’t possibly promote anything other than Newsbreak.

Newsbreak has a place in the overall scheme of things. I am using it to provide some baseline income so that I can pay my social media guy and other suppliers while I build my website and my brand. There is no way in hell Newsbreak is going to support that effort. I would be seen as stealing eyeballs from them, rather than simply exercising my free speech rights as a writer to write as I wish.

Again. Newsbreak is a Chinese-owned company. It will never behave like an American one. The value sets are fundamentally different, and it would be foolish to expect or hope for anything different. So if you are going to write for Newsbreak, understand the rules, manage your expectations and choose your battles.

Hope that helps.