A Penny for Your Page View: The Social Network That Pays You

On the surface, social networking startup Bubblews works a lot like Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Users create “bubbles” (posts), follow one another, and Like and comment on the posts they find the most interesting. But Bubblews believes it has the secret ingredient to attract new users despite industry leaders fighting tooth and nail to keep them from straying: Bubblews is paying users to post.

When you share on Bubblews, you’re paid for every Like, comment and unique view your post receives (but not writing the post itself). Like other social networks, users write about a broad range of topics, from the World Cup to gardening tips. Bubblews splits it revenue evenly with users who are creating the content.

“If it’s user-based content,” says Jason Zuccari, the network’s president and cofounder, “then without the users you can’t have a business.”

It’s a counterintuitive strategy. Most users spent the past five years accepting the fact that companies use their information to feed them targeted ads. Facebook, for example, collects billions of dollars each quarter by advertising to its user base. Twitter operates the same way, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Bubblews doesn’t think this is fair.

“People aren’t the product, people are the power,” CEO and cofounder Arvind Dixit told Mashable. “But it’s just kind of been drilled that people are the product and [companies] can do whatever the hell they want with you.”

The strategy doesn’t mean Bubblews users are getting rich. The going rate for receiving a Like, comment or unique view is roughly $0.01, says Dixit, but rare power users are making “a couple thousand” dollars per month. The bulk of Bubblews users won’t make it rich on the platform, but they are compensated for their time and contributions anyways.

The social network isn’t really that new; it was founded in the fall of 2012. Dixit and Zuccari, who met eight years ago as freshmen at West Virginia University, never sought press coverage, in part because they were embarrassed by the product’s interface.

Bubblews unveiled a redesign early Wednesday, but the previous design looked more like hodgepodge of spammy Internet links than visual-heavy networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The redesign mimics that familiar spread of images and stories, separated as individual cards in a news feed-style format.

Even with a new look and the offer to pay users, Bubblews still has some obstacles to overcome. For instance, Bubblews still doesn’t offer a mobile app for iOS or Android, an area where most consumer startups seem to focused. While the company has a new mobile product coming out later this year, Dixit says it’s a complimentary feature, not an app version.

Users could abuse the system by setting up bots to automatically Like or comment on their own posts to profit, but Dixit says the company cracks down on them, which comprise between 2 to 5% of the site’s total user base. Overall, the majority of those on Bubblews are sharing appropriately, he says.

The service is also headed in a different direction content-wise than Twitter and Vine, which are putting limits on the length of users’ content. Twitter imposed a 140-character limit for tweets, while Bubblews has a 400-character minimum for posts, requiring users to create longer pieces.

It may serve as a barrier to entry, though, for users who aren’t comfortable who aren’t interested in writing novellas.

With 200,000 active users, Bubblews is still far off from competing with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which have hundreds of millions more users. It does, however, offer an interesting alternative.

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Bubblews’s shared revenue model may mean users actually wantto see ads on the platform; it means they’re getting paid.