Stories On NewsBreak Began To Earn A Few Dollars
Instead of hundreds
The earnings went down considerably
After being late to the NewsBreak parties on two or three occasions, I once again missed the boat. The stories that I thought would bring in $1,500 a month are now earning just a few dollars or even pennies. They changed the rules on payments, and it seems to be a very low pay structure now.
I did not hear about NewsBreak until people started to write about it on Medium. They said they were receiving a guaranteed payment of $1,000 a month. When I applied a couple of times, they had apparently stopped taking new creators.
Then I received an email saying that I could sign up. I did and was accepted. It did require 10 articles being written and 200 followers before you could apply for monetization. It was easy to do the ten articles, and extra were done. It was possible to get 200 followers in two weeks by some stroke of good luck and by doing more articles.
So monetization was applied for immediately. It sounded good. The website said that they would try to answer quickly but that it could take up to 30 days. Following the advice of Tim Denning in an article he wrote, I emailed them a few times to ask about the progress. They said they were busy making changes so it was taking longer than usual. I had hoped to start earning money right away.
It took 45 days, but they did finally approve the monetization. I’m not sure that was a good thing. By that time, they had made changes in their pay structure and revisions in what type of stories they would allow. They said you could no longer use breaking news stories which were on major news outlets. That was very limiting. How else are you supposed to discover breaking news?
The way that NewsBreak had been paying meant that a person could earn up to $1,500 a month with some consistent effort. That’s not a whole lot of money, but it was a fairly sure way to supplement one’s income.
The stories were rated with something called a CV number. Stories with the lower numbers received $25 each while higher numbers brought in $60 for a story which they published. It was easy to estimate earnings.
Twenty stories at the $60 mark would bring in $1,200. Several more stories added even at the lower amount would likely bring the total for the month to $1,500. It seemed too good to be true for newcomers. It turned out to be just that. They changed it so that no longer happens.
As someone wrote, NewsBreak is a business which is out to make money for themselves. They helped some writers along the way in the beginning, but now perhaps their bottom line is more important. If they can get away with paying pennies for a story instead of dollars, that helps them. Getting to the $1,500 mark for writers now seems almost impossible.
Several writers such as Bebe Nicholson have written that they are exiting the NewsBreak platform. It is no longer worth their time.
Stories published so far this month would likely have brought in about $500 under the old system. The amount earned thus far shows up as less than $5. That is a huge difference. The $1,500 a month no longer appears to be possible.
Unless they change their pay plan once again to benefit writers, it is likely that many more of their content creators will be leaving. Perhaps NewsBreak doesn’t need them because they collect news from media outlets. They could be trying to weed them out or force them to leave.
You might have thought you were finally going to see some decent returns. Then they pulled out the rug from under you. It might mean falling and failing.
The program was just revised. It does seem probable that people who were earning $1,500 a month could make less than $100 with the changes. Those who are continuing to write for NewsBreak with the new challenges will have to see if the new system works or if they will change the rules once again. Whether success on NewsBreak is possible now is questionable.