Community Publisher Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What do I need to start an online newspaper or community?
A. A computer, access to the Internet and most importantly: ideas, information and opinions you would like to share with others in your community. Computer and journalism experience are helpful but not required. As a Community Publisher, your job will be to:
- Customize the site setup using your knowledge of the community or topic
- Generate the initial content on your site by creating summaries and links to other publications and writing articles
- Contact members of your geographical or topical community to let them know about your site
- Get other people in your geographical or topical community to post articles
- Maintain your site's appearance by deleting any duplicate articles, or content that does not conform to our terms of use
- Contact potential advertisers in your community to let them know the benefits of advertising on your site
Q. Are there any costs or hidden charges to me?
A. No.
Q. Does my paper need to be geographically based?
A. No. You can use our software to start specialty trade publications, political publications or any topically oriented publication.
Q. Do I have to create all the content on my paper myself?
A. No. A large part of your function as a Community Publisher is to contact people in your geographical or topical community to let them know about your site and encourage them to publish on it. You can also use any content anywhere on our network of 1000's of sites, as well as create summaries and links to other sites.
Q. How will people find my site?
A. Your site will appear in geographical and topical directories on all of our other sites, this will drive readers to you. As noted above, one of your primary functions as a Community Publisher is to contact people in your community to let them know about the site.
Q. How will I make money?
A. You keep all the revenues generated on your site(s) from Google Adsense advertising as well as half of all the net revenue from ads purchased directly on your site using our ad purchasing software.
Q. How much money can I make?
A. It all depends on the popularity of your site. Currently, our sites average approximately $1.00 per thousand in gross revenues per 1,000 actual page views (page views generated by actual readers not generated by robots, spiders automated systems etc.) While we don't promise that your site will generate the $1.00 per thousand figure, if you performed as well as our average you would need 500,000 actual page views per month to reach $500. That's 5,000 people reading 100 pages on your site in one month.
Q. You say you will split net revenues 50/50 with me, what does "net revenues" mean?
A. Net revenues are the gross revenues generated specifically by your site less costs directly associated with your site: primarily bandwidth, licenses and fees we pay for content you may use. Although we cannot guarantee a specific net revenue percentage, we expect the net revenue figure to be approximately 75% of the gross revenue figure. Credit card processing fees are 3%, credit card charge-backs, licenses and bandwidth are around 5% and copyright fees in the range of 10 to 20%.
Email additional questions to: CommunityPublisher@getlocalnews.com