YouSayToo Revenue Sharing Bites the Dust1

The big news is that we are focusing our efforts on boosting your blog and content readership. We believe that having a wider audience and being read is the key value we need to focus on right now. This will be our #1 priority and we already have some exciting features in the works.

To fully focus on making the necessary changes to boost readership we will be taking a step back from revenue sharing. We have terminated our relationship with Google AdSense and removed all AdSense ads from YouSayToo. Some ads may be displayed on YouSayToo to partly cover our operational expenses. Infolinks remains an option for earning revenue but it’s possible that it too may be closed.

Our plan is to fully commit to boosting readership after which we will focus on content monetization.

We are always open to your feedback and ideas, so feel free contact us with any questions or comments.

Best regards,YouSayToo team

Should we be surprised? Not really and here is why.

Duplicate Content: Much of the blog content on YouSayToo is generated by RSS feeds from other blogs. You can set up your YouSayToo blog to republish your posts on YouSayToo. While this does expose your work to a wider readership, it also generates a clone of your content which is bad in Google’s eyes.

If you are regularly interlinking your posts the republishing of posts actually created automatic backlinks as well, which is good, but likely not enough to offset the duplicate content problem.

Possible Adsense Policy Violation: Adsense TOS state that you should only be using your Adsense ID on original and unique content. Much of the YouSayToo model was built on duplicate content. While the email says that “We have terminated our relationship with Google AdSense and removed all AdSense ads from YouSayToo.“ no one terminates your main stream of income with nothing to replace it with. My guess is there is more to the story than the email lets on.

Low Readership: When I started this blog, the reposts on YouSayToo used to sometimes outrank the original posts on this blog. Now I don’t see that and I’ve noticed very low adsense impressions at YouSayToo. I’m guessing that Google is not ranking YST very high now and that is why the site admin is talking about improving readership.

My Conclusion: With low readership and no revenue share, YouSayToo is dead as a useful resource. It might have some value as a place to build backlinks or as a free blog host but there are other better options out there.

Infobarrel is a reputable revenue sharing site for articles (75%->90% Revenue Share). Great for building quality contextual backlinks.

Google’s Blogspot is a dead easy free blogging platform and, unlike YouSayToo, you can easy add your own ads on Blogger. Adsense integration is easy, as is Amazon Associates. Or try Viglink on Blogger for access to thousands of affiliate programs with one easy addition of a piece of code. Also, no fear of having Blogspot go dark, while now near revenueless YST could be easily be closed down.

Your Own Hosted Blog may be the best because you control the domain, you control how you make money with it and you set the site rules.