Can You Still Make Money On NewsBreak? Yes, You Can!

1 Million+ Page Views and 6200 Followers in My First Month as a Paid Creator

NewsBreak After All the Changes

Many writers, like myself, came late to the NewsBreak game. We weren’t the fortunate ones who were guaranteed $1000 per month back in November. When I signed up on July 24, 2021, the criteria for becoming a paid writer was to amass 200 followers and to publish 10 stories. That was the easy part, and I achieved that in less than three weeks. (I’ve recently read that the criteria has been lowered to only 100 followers).

A more difficult change to swallow came days before I was accepted into the (paid) Creator Program. Suddenly, the Content Value rating system (CV score) was tossed out — leaving many writers rudderless in their journey to produce valuable content.

When I signed up, I suspected the 90-day base pay period of $25 to $60 per article wouldn’t last long, but there was also the incentive payment structure, based on reads. At the time it was either $4 or $10 per thousand page views based on the CV score (the details of this now defunct system were public knowledge). I thought, yeah, I can work with that.

By scrapping the CV rating system, they changed the rules right before I came up to bat… but I decided to stick with it, even though no one seemed to know what writers would now be paid.

For those that don’t know, the CV score was a figure between 1 and 10 that determined how much writers would be paid per article per one thousand views. A score of 1–4 got you $4 per thousand views, 5–10 got you $10 per thousand views. This score was based on how NewsBreak rated your article in terms of what they were looking for — local, exciting news stories that had not yet been covered extensively.

I should clarify here, for the uninitiated — “PV’s”, or page views, are what Medium considers “reads”. It means someone has actually read your article. This is what you get paid for. The term for someone viewing your headline but not clicking to read it further is called “Impressions” at NewsBreak — akin to Medium’s “Views”. You do not get paid for this.

CV scores also provided writers with some guidance on which type of articles they should be writing. As you’ve no doubt heard, Medium articles, in general, don’t translate well to NewsBreak. I tried republishing some of my Medium stories on NewsBreak myself, and they received very low scores and low reads. I don’t even bother with that anymore.

What Currently Determines An Article’s Value on NewsBreak?

I signed an NDA with NewsBreak, so I won’t show you specifics about what pay rate they have assigned to my articles. But I will say, it’s not based on your value as a writer, it’s based on your individual articles, and it changes for each one that you publish.

The method they now use is referred to as the “RPM” of an article. The RPM number is how much you earn per thousand views. The contract terms are generic and vague — they don’t even disclose what range the RPMs encompasses. Many writers assumed it runs between $4 and $10, based on the old system.

I will say this: I have never heard of anyone receiving a 10, and I can personally attest to the minimum being WAY, WAY, WAY below 4.

My First Big Money Maker Was My First Article

After achieving my 200/10 criteria on July 10, there was a 30-day waiting period. Some people stop writing for NewsBreak during this period, saying they’ve given NB enough free articles. I think this is a mistake. NewsBreak wants writers who produce at least 3x per week, and before you’re approved for monetization, you’re really just in a probationary period. So, my advice, keep writing at least a few stories per week. You will not get retro pay for these articles, but if you’re approved and the articles get read after that, you DO get paid for those reads.

Exactly 30 days after applying, I was approved for monetization. I wrote the article above — which was NOT local, and it did NOT get a high RPM (not a terrible one, but not great)

The article took off! Within three days it had over 80k reads, and now it has over 87k. I earned several hundred dollars from this article. I was psyched!

I wrote two local news articles after that, and the highest number of reads they received was 6k. The local articles were assigned a higher RPM, but it didn’t make up for the difference in reads.

So, I went with national news again. Let’s face it, Covid-19 is on everyone’s minds. I wrote the article below, and it has received over 1 million reads. My most-read article, to date.

NewsBreak makes their money from the ad revenue — 3 or 4 ads are stuffed into each of your articles. Even though they reached a lot of viewers with the ads in the above article, they assigned it a shockingly low RPM, and I was a bit discouraged. I really didn’t make that much money on this one, even with all the reads, shares, comments and follows.

On the bright side, the article pushed my followers way up.

After being a paid contributor on NewsBreak for only 34 days, I now have 6200 followers, so that’s definitely going to work in my favor — more eyes (potentially) on whatever I write.

Here’s an example of how some of the national articles stacked up against a local one.

Pros and Cons

There are both pros and cons to writing for NewsBreak, in my opinion. There may be more in the “Cons” column, but the “Pros” are worth a lot to me.

Pros

• More money-making potential. I just completed my first 30 days as a paid contributor, and I’ve made almost $600. That’s 8x more than I’ve ever made on Medium in a month (though I’m relatively new here, as well).
• Better automatic distribution. Unlike Medium, you can sit back after writing your article and watch the views come in. It’s not a back-scratching community. You’re not obligated to read anyone’s article — in fact, you don’t know who’s read yours. “Likes” are anonymous, and so are your followers. NewsBreak distributes your article without any effort on your part.
• Fast turn-around on publishing. I’ve heard others complain that NewsBreak is slow to publish. While it’s true they sometimes take a full day or two to publish your article, especially on weekends, I’ve sometimes had to wait a full week on Medium. And a lot of times NewsBreak publishes your article within the hour.

Cons

RPM rating lags 48 hours behind publishing. This is a big one, and contributes greatly to writers’ dissatisfaction and lack of trust in NewsBreak. Your article is published. You watch excitedly over the next two days as the page views pour in. You amass tens of thousands of PVs before they assign your article an RPM. The RPM comes in at pennies on the dollar. Is this a coincidence? Perhaps not. I’ve noticed, and have heard many others complain, that their articles that have higher PVs always receive low RPMs, while the less-read articles somehow are assigned high RPMs. I am pretty convinced NewsBreak is playing us on this. If not, then why else wait two full days before deciding what RPM to assign the article? The articles are all reviewed before publishing…assign it then. The gripe is, if you’re unhappy upon receiving the RPM, it makes no difference at that point if you pull the article — NewsBreak has already benefited from two full days of ad revenue. Not. Quite. Fair.

Rules are constantly changing. I know they’re a new platform that’s trying to find it’s feet, but, honestly, it seems like the rules keep changing, mid-game. After months of being known for encouraging “near click-bait” headlines, they’ve recently announced they’re cracking down and flagging titles that need to be changed. Fine, but they’ve gone a little overboard. My article titled, “20 North Carolina Jobs That Are Offering Big Sign-On Bonuses” was flagged for the word “Big”. Seriously? I changed “Big” to “$$$” and that fixed it.

Creator support is slow. I’ve had to ask questions a few times and always had to wait close to a week to receive an answer…and sometimes the answer didn’t address the question.

The comments…OMG. Do yourself a favor, and don’t read the comments on your articles. It’s like the worst of humanity has been paid to come on and heckle you, or heckle each other, or both. Often irrelevant to the article, the comments are full of awful, racist, and mostly misspelled sentiments that will diminish your faith in your fellow humans.

Indifference/Disconnection between staff and writers. You get the feeling they really don’t care. It’s a much different gig than writing for a publication on Medium, or even on Vocal Media. Recently, I received a “strike” against my account (3 strikes and you’re out), and they pulled an article. The email was unspecific, citing copyright violation. I made sure my photos had attribution (they already did) and re-submitted. Declined for publishing, no explanation. I wrote to Creator Support, waited 5 days for a response, and found out it was because the article was published here under my pen name. The copyright violation was really accusing me of plagiarism. Here’s the thing — NewsBreak had asked me on my application for my pen names and also where I was published. They had that info already. No email questioning me (as Vocal Media did once, politely). They assumed it was plagiarism and issued a strike. It took almost three weeks to straighten it out. They never apologized.

So…Is It Worth It?

If you’re in it mostly for the money, I say yes. I have a lot of gripes with the way NewsBreak is handling things, and there may come a time when they make a change that becomes the last straw… but right now, writing is my sole income, and NewsBreak delivers the goods.

My advice is this: try not to get so involved in writing your news articles that you neglect writing for your soul. It’s easy to become caught up, especially once you’ve seen those dollar signs. You’re thinking, “what can I write next that will top that?” I did this myself for a couple weeks, and writing became less than rewarding. Fortunately, I write fiction, as well, and busied myself with that over a weekend, ignoring NewsBreak completely, and got my head straight.

Writing straight-up news (for me) is like always eating dinner and never eating dessert…what fun is there in that? I want a hot fudge sundae!

Wishing you the best of success and happiness in your writing!

-Hunter Cabot