Pocketables transparency: who we are, what’s going on
I’ve considered doing this as a page, but not yet as I want our active readers to find it and not discover it buried under the about menu or something. As things keep changing it’s also entirely possible you might be interested in knowing what we were at this time rather in the far future when robots write our articles and humanity is enslaved by sentient snails.
Pocketables
Currently I’m acting as the admin and editor in chief by default for the website. That said, that entails creating an account and letting people who want to write do their own thing (unless it hurts the site).
The website is owned by someone else which is potentially:
Crowdgather
Evidently we’re either no longer affiliated with them or we’re part of the last remaining assets. This is what I’ve been told. Info I have is Pocketables is one of six sites that had an income that was kept by someone, several thousand others were sold off in bulk. Yeah, mighty vague. I’ll be finding out soon I’m sure.
Domain name is paid through March 9th, 2017, so we’ll panic if we don’t hear things near then.
Income stream
Whoever owns the site gets money from impressions from banner ads. I have never personally controlled the advertising and the networks and ads were part of various networks. They’re still getting some income from banner ads, looks like most of these are Google Adsense.
On new articles authors tag their reviews with Amazon and other affiliate links. Each author has their own code and is not beholden to the site, whoever the current owners are, etc. After three months the owners of the site can tag links and get residuals.
They’ve not contacted me about doing this yet.
Inherent conflicts of interest?
The old G&E and Pocketables had a straight up pay per article model with any income going to the owners.
The new model unfortunately incentivises people to say product X is great so they get a commission. I trust nobody is going to do this as they wouldn’t be writing for the site any longer. Should you think anything’s a little too peachy drop me a note.
Incentives
Writing for Pocketables authors get a little bit of money from commissions on sales. They also get to play with neat gadgets, test and use new products before anyone else does, and some exposure for those with other sites.
As nobody’s making bank on this, it’s a hobby that might be beer money one month and -$2 the next (really happened due to product returns.)
In most cases on products less than $200msrp the author probably gets to keep it. While I’ve personally never sold a product after getting it, I have traded for other products, so this could be considered a different income stream for the authors.
Disincentives
Articles such as Tasker pieces and anything we write up on how to do something free that doesn’t have a product link don’t make the author money. As I didn’t expect Pocketables to be around this long after they tried so hard to let us die, I never got an incentive model for that.
Suggestions are appreciated so I can potentially make it worth people’s time.
Paid product placement
As far as I know it’s never happened. I get offers all the time, referred them to CG advertising, never heard anything back.
We’re a loose enough group now it’s possible someone could be made an offer they couldn’t refuse and we wouldn’t catch it. I doubt it though.
Feel free to make me an offer, I’ve been trying to sell out for years now ;)
Use of tracking information
Not a clue. I’m sure someone had the idea of tracking people and selling that info from a couple of micropixels I found in the code, but if they did anything with that info it sure didn’t help them out any.
Various beagles we found
Sometimes it’s getting close to noon and you want a sandwich and your internet goes out and you hope that it comes back before you have to take your boss to get his car.
In summary
All the authors have their own thing going income wise, I don’t think anyone’s sold out or if they did I wish they would share. Future is also once again vague although we all have plans we might share if things look like they’re going sideways.
If you’ve got any questions, feel free to drop ’em… yup, my main internet is still down…
