Operation Bob

Yuwie, one of the latest competitors in the social bookmarking crowd, offers to pay folks for using their site.  They claim you don’t need to do anything special to earn some cash, just view pages, post content, and have your pages view.  But, will it work? 

 After joining the site and spending a few hours poking around it seems to be attracting more folks in search of a work at home income than typical social networkers just getting paid to do what they normally do.  Essentially, the offer of payment for posts and views seems to be encouraging people not to do what they normally would, instead posting excessively, adding friends just to increase page views, etc. 

Basically, the community seems focused on the networking rather than the social, making it very similar to other shared advertising sites and less like a social networking site — except that advertising isn’t allowed on Yuwie, so members have to be quite creative if they want to promote their affiliate marketing projects and often just focus on getting paid from Yuwie by building their page views and spewing out as much content as possible. 

The amount of payout varies depending on how much revenue the site generates - but their examples make it clear that if you want to earn more than a few pennies in a month you’ll need people to sign up under you.  Ahhh yes, another one of those where you get paid for bringing other people in. 

Normally I’m not a fan of that practice, but in this case I can see the legitimate need, at least for the time being.  With a few hundred thousand members, and wanting to compete with networks in the millions, the site needs to gain new members - and a lot of them.  Since it’s free, and there isn’t anything for members to buy I don’t really see a problem with the focus on referrals in this case.

To early to tell how this one will play out, but I’ll keep you posted.  If you want to try it for yourself it doesn’t cost anything to join.

As a social networking site, it’s not my favorite - maybe because there are so many now and I’m just used to others.  The content area is rather small - which will be handy for 800×600 viewers, unfortunately there are only a few of those left.  In addition to banner and text ads, there are full page ads that stop you between every few page views, which is mildly annoying.