Bukisa

We are happy to announce today that we are adding two new minimum payout levels:

$10 and $25

Where the new default minimum payout is $10 (instead of the current $50 minimum payout), these changes will have an immediate effect and will be active for the upcoming payout in March.

We have done this due to great feedback from our community.

If you wish to receive a higher minimum payout, please login at http://www.bukisa.com/login using your display name and password, and go to your account settings to change your minimum payout.

And don’t forget to stay tuned, our latest updates & features are coming very soon…

All the best!

Simon and the Bukisa Team.

Some of you might have seen our tweet from the other day regarding enhancing articles using the letter ‘e’ on your keyboards, so here is what its all about.

There is a new service called ‘Apture’ that allows our site visitors and users to enhance existing articles (only people that have allowed this under their CC license will have this active on their articles).

So what can be added you ask?

So for example you link to a Youtube video, so before Apture the user would have to click and leave Bukisa to go watch the movie, now with an enhanced article all the reader needs to do is hover over the link and they will be able to watch the movie in a nice little pop-up window, you can even choose to embed the video in to the page at a click of a button if you wish.

So, any article boasting this CC license – (which is our default license for new content) will be able to have their article ‘enhanced’ – all that you need to do is click the letter ‘e’ on your keyboard and signup for free with Apture.

You can try it on this article (which I enhanced by adding Wikipedia information for each country mentioned in the article).

http://www.bukisa.com/articles/26055_top-10-tourist-destinations

By enhancing articles users visiting will remain longer on our site and enjoy exposure to more materials and thus contribute to a better overall performance for our site and content.

You can learn more about the features of Apture here: http://www.apture.com/bloggers/

If you are also interested in becoming an editor of Apture enhancements for Bukisa please drop us a line and let us know.

We would like to let everyone know that we have now completed the upgrade to version 1.0 Beta of Bukisa

With this new version we hope that all you will have a smoother time on our site, better features and better opportunities to produce quality content and get traffic to it.

Below is a list of the new features that have been added over the past 3 weeks:

• Twitter Integration – http://www.bukisa.com/faq/?faq=11#faq_11
• New Bukisa widget – You can our new widget to drive more traffic from your other online to sites to your Bukisa content. To build a widget, just login and go to your MyBukisa page and click the widget banner to start the wizard.
• Auto tagging and Auto thumbnails suggestions courtesy of Zemanta – http://www.zemanta.com
• Revamped MyBukisa Home Page
• Simplified network page – friends, invitations and network connections all on one page with a new Network search option
• Full earnings & views stats per content on your “My Content” report
• New JavaScript backend to make Bukisa more cross browser compatible.
• Moved over to a new video encoding service, faster encoding and higher quality. (Ooyala)
• New licensing options – per content, choose from 3 types. http://www.bukisa.com/info/syndication
• Slides Upload is enabled again.

Some of planed features for the next version:

• Private messaging between users
• Search for friends
• Notification system (when someone you invited joins Bukisa, when you get a new comment and other social activates involving you and your network)
• Embed videos in your articles from external sources (like YouTube)
• Auto resizing of images you place in articles so they don’t break the article design.
• Full Network Drilldown (Earnings, Views, Users)
• Improvements to “My Content” page
• Improvements to invite system.
• New My Comments section.
• Better “Following” of your network & friends.

Some open issues that are still undecided (from our feedback forum)

• Lowering the minimum payout
• Minimum word count for articles (on certain categories)

As always we are eager to get your feedback on the above features and any new ideas you may have to our feedback forum – http://bukisa.uservoice.com/

I would I also like to let everyone know that very soon we will be making some changes to how we calculate our Bukisa Index – based on the activity and the performance of Bukisa over the past few months – this will benefit the active and “good” users and not so benefit the “bad” spammers & abusers of our system.

A separate email regarding the Bukisa Index will be released if and when any changes are made.

Hi Everyone,

I would like to inform everyone about some policy changes and clarifications that will be taking full effect from the 1st of January 2009.

Bukisa will no longer be accepting content that is being published in a language other than English. The reason for this is that advertising placed on non English content brings in less revenue for the website and thus we cannot give out a high Bukisa Index to these contents.

We do plan to offer more languages in the future and with each language would come a unique rev-share model that will work best for the publishers, us and our advertisers, but for now this is our decision.

We just wanted to also make sure that everyone knows what kind of content we are willing to have published on our network:

• How-to
• Educational
• Instructional
• Creative Writing (Short stories and poems)
• Reviews (non promotional)
• Content that teaches new knowledge or a new skill

Another question we frequently get via our support email is “Why was my content sent for review”. Well, the answer is pretty simple – we run several checks on content that is submitted and we select content to be reviewed but our editorial team for Quality control and testing proposes. (This includes: length, grammar, keywords, copyright checks and more).

Please let us known if you have any more questions.

P.S. lookout for some neat changes to the website tomorrow ….

Bukisa has made it in to the second round of the Mashable Open Web Awards thanks to all of you.
Now round two is open, please use the below widget to vote, you can come once a day and vote again.

Don’t forget to tell all your friends on facebook, twitter & social networks about the voting.

Thanks for Voting!

We at Bukisa are extremely driven to have high quality content and high quality users on our site, and with this we are able to reward our community of contributes with a higher revenue share than most other UGC websites.

But for us to be able to reward all contributors with what they deserve we also require high quality readers & viewers.

As such, participating in all types of traffic exchange sites such as suexchange, autohits and so on… the quality of traffic isn’t high from these sites and in most cases the “visitor” is not an interested reader/viewer, these types of sites hurt the overall performance of Bukisa, as people are just pumping their content with views to gain a few extra cents.

In the end this would lead to a lower rev-share for all our contributors.

We know its important for you to get your content out there, but we ask that “deals” and such practices be left out.

We don’t mind social sites, stumbling and such – but lets keep it natural.

If you have any questions or suggestions about this post, please leave us a comment.

Simon & The Bukisa Team

We are glad to have been featured on Mashable.com – The startup review.

It’s also a treat to see the service clearly delineate its Bukisa Index statistic. Without going into too much detail, the number shown is what users can expect insofar as financial returns go for every 1,000 unique visits registered. Currently the Index stands at 4.20, which means users can gather $4.20 per mille if in fact they manage to secure the necessary reader figure(s). If Bukisa’s popularity grows, the Index is likely to rise as well. (According to site copy, any changes made to the Index are seen roughly every four weeks.)

That’s not all. Bukisa also involves a friendly dimension in its payment system. If you invite friends to join you on the network, and they themselves begin to produce content that generates traffic that too results in revenue, you yourself will see income to the tune of a 25% bonus. And if those friends then invite other contacts, who in turn deliver popular material, you’ll see one-sixteenth of their total revenue. So if your respective social circles are especially prolific, and both short-term and long-term traffic data is high, you could very well see ample and steady cash sent your way.

Read the full review…

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the new Bukisa Blog.

We are going to keep you updated with the latest news from our community, including intresting content, new features and general updates.

In the meantime check out our new Bukisa Feedback Forum, where you can suggest new features you feel our site is missing.

All the best,

Simon & the Bukisa Team.