Freelancing at Home

I've blacked out the title of the article, because that's not really anyone's business but my own, and sorry for the gray marks over the stats; I had it highlighted when I did a screen shot and it came out with the highlighting intact. Oops. Either way, here it is. Views, comments, star rating and earnings. Clearly we make more than a penny a click or a penny per view or whatever it is people are currently theorizing we make.

This article earned 28 cents on its third day of existence. A friend told me he clicked an ad - after some serious probing and questions of 'how did you find this nifty website' and answers of 'one of the links on your article' - and so I watched to see if anything ever showed as significant earnings on the article. Two days after he clicked something, 28 cents appeared, which is within norms of an ad click on this particular keyword phrase. The article was still displaying only one view.

Over the next few weeks, the article has only accumulated a handful of views and only 2 more cents.

No matter how you slice it though, there is no Earthly way this article was earning a penny per click - which would require the amount earned to be a good deal less than the views. Instead, I have 11 cents more in Listmyfive earnings than the number of views on this article.

Listmyfive has remained silent about earnings, but I suspect they will continue to do so, and I only imagine them breaking silence to say, 'please see our FAQ which lays out our payment algorithm' which is the most annoying non-answer ever. If they wanted the algorithm to be transparent they would have made it that way to start with.

Edit: LM5 staff updated information available shortly after I made this post. My theory about Listmyfive earnings was confirmed.

Payments - why do I see a penny here and a penny there? We have explained this a couple of times before, but let me make it a bit more clear. We pay a percentage of the clicks that google adsense reports to us. If they don't report a click, they must have deemed it a fraudulent click. Some clicks are a penny, but most legitimate clicks are much more than that. We don't only pay on clicks though. We use many other variables, it is not a trivial algorithm, it is well thought out, and benefits those that benefit LM5 the most. If you see a penny here and penny there, you were most likely paid from the algorithm and not an ad click. The algorithm can pay much more than a penny here and there as well. Also, the views you see, are not used in the algorithm, they are views for your convenience, to see traffic increases through your online efforts. As you all know, we are a new site, and the amount of traffic we receive from search engines is still relatively low, but it is definitely increasing steadily. With time, as many of you have mentioned and deduced already, search engine traffic will increase dramatically. We need strong solid users initially to make that a future reality. We feel we have a great core of users, and we are very grateful for them.