Single Grain

Unless you’ve been living under a heavy rock for the last few months, I’m sure you’ve heard of the webs newest social networking site called Yuwie. Yuwie is strikingly similar to the bigger sites in the social networking game, with one exception – Yuwie pays you to be a member.

At least, that’s the theory.

You see, Yuwie is still pretty new to the social networking arena, but with so many people joining and a total of nearly 130,000 members, its gaining steam, and fast. Looking at the simple chart they have on their homepage, it looks like they are averaging a few thousand new members per day. I’m sure you could discount some of these numbers due to spam and people trying to “game” them, but never-the-less they’re growing at an impressive rate.

With theoretical promises of upwards of $10,000 per month assuming you refer a certain amount of people, and since the referral levels go ten deep, they are definitely attracting the crowds of people trying to make a quick buck on the internet. A great marketing strategy, even if it’s still in its infancy. The only problem with sites like this that promise to pay big money if all of the stars align, is the heavy dark cloud left over by AGLOCO. AGLOCO had just about every webmaster and blogger in the world promoting their site, but a pending bankruptcy and unfulfilled promises of riches proved otherwise. If a site like Yuwie wants to make it without losing their “you-know-what’s”, then they need to have a sound strategy in place and need to be prepared to shell out some serious dough.

Yuwie pays out based on many different actions of the user, ranging from clicking other profiles, uploading pictures, creating new blog entries, recruiting new members, and many other actionable actions. This pay comes from advertising revenue that Yuwie makes on a monthly basis, and on the 15th of each month, Yuwie decides how much each user gets paid out of their advertising earnings from the previous month. After digging around a bit in the search engines, I found that most average members made a couple of dollars, while some of the more popular bloggers and webmasters were in the $50-$90 range. Not bad, but a far cry from the $10k that users hope to be making in the future as the site grows.

After checking some statistics on smartpagerank.com, Yuwie was registered back in May, making the site close to five months old and it’s reporting around 54,000 pages indexed in Google. Of course, there is no PageRank, but that’s because there hasn’t been a PageRank update for quite some time now. One of the most impressive stats is the Alexa ranking they’ve attained already. For a 5 month old site, they’ve climbed the Alexa ladder to a 3 month ranking of around 5,000. Not too shabby…

Only time will tell if Yuwie is worth signing up for. With so many other social sites out there, unless the money is really rolling in, I can’t imagine juggling another social networking site. Give Yuwie a couple more months to see what happens, and if it’s still going strong as some predict, then it just may be something to check into.