How to Succeed Under the New Monetization Terms at News Break

And How It’s Different From the Old Plan

Are you on News Break yet? Should you be?

That’s hard to say but read on to find out more.

Since the middle of December, I’ve been on News Break and have been happy with the money I made there. But that is only because of the plan they offered to new writers. Now the program has changed. Will it be better or worse? Like many things in life, it depends.

When I first heard of the platform here on Medium and checked it out, I was hooked almost immediately. Why? I’m glad you asked. It was because they dangled a very enticing phrase in front of me. That phrase was, “We will pay you a minimum of $1,000 a month.”

Wait, what?

Many Medium writers were jumping on the deal also, but less than 10% of those writers make over $100 a month, as I understand it. Fortunately for me, I am not in that category. I cleared that hurdle my fourth month, and for the last eight months, I have averaged $1,000 a month.

Still, doubling that number was very attractive. Especially since many people I followed were just repurposing their Medium articles on the new platform.

Sweet!

But wait, there’s more. And less.

First, the less part. That thousand bucks was only guaranteed if you met three criteria. You had to publish twelve articles a month (or three a week, the deal varied), you had to average over 500 reads each, and you had to have more than 500 followers. Based on my experience with Medium, I didn’t expect that to be a problem. But just in case, there was the more part.

As part of an “early bird” special, they would wave the second two requirements for the first three months. That’s right. I had to produce twelve articles a month, which didn’t even need to be original, and bring home an extra $1K a month. They had, as Don Corleone said, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Spoiler Alert: I didn’t refuse it.

I was skeptical, however, since this clearly fell under the too good to be true category. But, hey, I am mostly copying and pasting, so let’s see what happens. With that, on December 11, I published, or republished my first piece on Newsbreak. It was also one of my first articles here on Medium. The only change I made was the title.

I didn’t change the title to make it different. I changed the title because, unlike Medium, News Break not only didn’t dislike clickbait, they actually encouraged it. This was going to be fun.

My skepticism continued until January 6, when a link on my News Break profile showed that a $1,000 payout had been approved. Now, we’re talking. I continued copying old Medium articles over but also explored and wrote new pieces. After all, I had three months to figure out how this thing worked, and I didn’t want to squander that time. I wrote another piece on that here.

I was both excited at the prospect and disappointed with the results. At Medium, I had already gathered over 2.5K followers, and it wasn’t unusual to get thousands, even tens of thousands of reads to my highly creative and wonderfully inspiring articles. Even if I do say so myself.

But on News Break, I had a paltry 100 followers, and many of my articles had reads, what they call page views, in the single digits. Both of these numbers were a long way from 500. I did discover that local newsy type articles usually did better than human interest or productivity articles like what I wrote on Medium. And after all, that’s what this honeymoon period was for. Figuring out how to game the system. I mean, take advantage of their subtle nuances.

I was slowly building up followers and learning how to attract more reads when, a week ago, News Break said, “Hey, we have a new deal.” They said this last thing on Friday afternoon. I suspect the last person to leave the office was tasked with sending that just before they turned out the lights for the weekend.

The brief note outlined a deal that no longer had minimum requirements but paid a guaranteed minimum based on the number of reads multiplied by some vague rating system. It also mentioned a new deal for the first three months that paid a flat rate per article, regardless of reads. Again this was based on the article’s rating, although no details were given on the rating system.

As expected, a flurry of activity ensued on the Facebook groups dedicated to that platform. What are the details? What about our old deal? There were both celebrations by those who knew they wouldn’t make the minimums and anger by those who already had.

Finally, yesterday, again late on Friday, they released all of the details. They didn’t just release it; they beat us over the head with it. Everyone got an email with a link to the new TOS and monetization scheme. But they also splashed the creator’s portal with a pop-up you had to agree to just to get to the site.

After much hand-wringing and confusion, they revealed that this pop up only forced you to agree to the new Terms of Service (TOS), not the monetization plan itself. You had to go to a link on the portal, click on that, and agree to it separately.

Okay, so what’s the deal? Well, first, a lot of it hinges on how your article is rated. Below is how they explained the new Content Value (CV) score.

Interestingly, all of my previous articles were scored. This was helpful to see what was working and what wasn’t from their perspective. But before I get into that, what’s the rest of the deal?

For the three month’s sign-on base pay, instead of the guaranteed $1,000, you would get $25 for each article with a CV of 1–4 and $60 for a CV of 5–10. After that, you would be paid $4 or $10 per thousand page views, again depending on the CV.

So what did this mean to me? My first question as we were nearing the payout date, how does this impact my $1,000? Since they gave me the historic CVs, this was easy to figure out. Based on January’s articles and the new base rate, I would actually earn more under the new plan than the $1,000. That’s the good news. I’ll get to the bad news in a minute.

This morning, that debate was laid to rest as I saw that my $1,000 payment for January was approved. It remains to be seen how or if February will pan out. I imagine a lot will depend on when or if I sign the new agreement.

Now for the bad news. If I get $4 per thousand views for a low rated article and my article has had seven views, well, do the math. I will definitely have to learn how to get those reads up, and the secret seems to be the local news angle. In my articles, that’s what seems to lie at the junction of a high CV and high read numbers. It’s not what I want to write, so time will tell if I can or want to adjust.

The problem with that scenario was pointed out by several people on the New Break Facebook groups. In their cases, the articles with tens of thousands of reads had very low CVs, and the pieces with a high CV had relatively low read numbers.

So, more bad news is that my old Medium articles aren’t likely to perform well. But at least they will count toward total reads. Under the old terms, items with low read counts would only drag my average down. I could see playing a game where, on any given month, if I’ve met the minimum requirements and my average is up, I would have to stop publishing until the next month for fear of dropping the average. Now, every read counts.

There are still many unanswered questions. But I will find the answers soon and will follow up. If you read this, clap a couple hundred times, give me a gold star, and comment, I’ll let you know what I find out. But what I’m thinking is, I will try to finish February under the old plan, which I hope nets me another $1K in March. Then, on March 1, I sign the new agreement, which gives me an additional three month grace period to work out the kinks.

So, that’s where we are today and how you can make money under the new plan at News Break.

Wait, someone is standing up in the back row. “Hey, Darryl, what about Vocal Media?”

Hmm, that sounds like another article. Stay tuned.