For those who don’t know, Yuwie is a new(ish) social networking site which shares a percentage of their ad revenue with its users. Sounds good in theory, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Yuwie seems to be based on the MySpace model, with each use having a profile, a photo gallery, a blog etc. You can customise your profile backgrounds and colours in the same sort of way as you do with Myspace (you can see my profile here). As a social networking site it seems pretty good, although there is nothing new. It used to be a bit slow due to the number of ads, but this seems to have got better, and the ads less annoying.

How much you earn depends on a few things. The number of “control panel” pages you view are counted, and so is how many times your profile is viewed by other members. Every month your total views gets multiplied by the monthly RSR (Revenue Sharing Rate), and then you get 10% of the total (I’ll explain why later).

Because the number of views your profile gets directly affects your earnings, everyone is very keen to make friends, in fact there are many “clubs” dedicated to getting more friends. People also advertise their blogs and pictures, in the hope they will get more referrals.

A lot of the content is based around making money online, but I have found some good stuff – for example I am a member of a group of arty people where people post their work – from poetry to ironwork and everything in between.

Now, you may remember I said you made 10% of the revenue for your views. This is because the rest is shared between the people who referred you up to 10 levels. This means a big way to make more money is to refer people of your own. in fact you earn the same percentage on your own views as you do the people 10 levels down, which means the real way to make money has got to be to recruit people and build up your tree – you could be completely inactive and still make lots of money.

Earnings

The Yuwie help pages give an estimated monthly earnings of over $10,000 dollars. This assumes everyone has 1,000 views and everyone refers 3 other people. It also assumes a slightly higher RSR than it was last month, but the sums add up.

So, I said I had my first full month, and so can reveal that my earnings for March were……

…$0.03

OK, so it’s not huge at all, but I’ve got no active referrals.

Recommendations

If you like social networking sites, give it a go, and treat it like any other social networking site: add your pics, customise your profile, make new friends, invite your friends.

Do not use it as a way to make money. Don’t add rubbish to your profile in the hope it will get a few more views (see my blog on Yuwie for an experiment I did with a different profile pic). There are lots of better ways to make money out there, probably including flipping burgers.

If you are good at inviting people and have lots of friends who like this sort of thing, then you may well make a bit of cash. I didn’t invite all my friends, because most of the people I know aren’t into this sort of thing.

The one thing I have found is that this isn’t a scam (I’ve seen evidence of payments), but you need to be realistic.

Use my referal link to sign up (or go straight to my profile to bypass the annoying sales pitch)

Additional note: a much better way to earn money for doing very little is My Search Funds – I’ve built up over £12 so far (see previous post).