Simpy and Raw Sugar, two competitors of the social bookmarks service del.icio.us, now pay the users for their bookmarks. Here’s my analysis.
Simpy simply (hey, nice word twist) allows you to add Google Ads on your user page. This way, if your links are popular, you may get money. Raw Sugar on the other hand pays the top-ten users, i.e. those ten who have the most traffic on their user pages, from $25 to $500.
Simpy
The way I’m using del.icio.us is most of the time just searching for something clicking on the link and that’s it. Or I’m RSS subscribed to popular/new for some specific tag. This way most of the time I never even see a specific user name. Which means that I think that the user pages won’t get much traffic – not enough for making the ads really pay out. But the solution is a low-risk for Simpy – at least what money concerns. And: Everybody can potentially make money every month.
Raw Sugar
Raw Sugar on the other hand give out their money for the top-ten users. This way the users compete – no matter if they are competing on 1.000 or 10.000 hits/month. That’s kind of fair. Until you reach a higher hit rate of course, where Adsense can make more sense – but my guess is that the hits aren’t that much. The problem here: Only ten guys get money each month.
But there is huge advantage: everything is transparent and the competition gives an extra motivation – have a look at the list for yourself. Top-1 currently is a russian guy who posts daily warez/muzic on his web page (I won’t give you the link here – check it out for yourself ;-)). And now we know that he’s making at least $500/month, hehe. But he’s the only one in the top-ten doing – well, that kind of stuff…
Conclusion
Long story short – I like the Raw Sugar idea much more. They will definitely get higher quality links with their payment – which they then can sell to Google, et al.. And they’ve introduced a whole new “service”: the top-ten itself is a cool idea – people love to compete. I’m sure that the links of Simpy will also get better. But that’s it. I guess both will add the other ones idea, i.e. Simpy a payed top-ten and Raw Sugar Adsense – if Simpy ‘s got the money and Raw Sugar won’t get broke 😉
Also check out the TechCrunch posting on that issue.
[tags]simpy, raw sugar, del.icio.us, adsense, google adsense[/tags]