My first impression of Minds Pro

I've talked forever about how YT really took off because they found a way to monetize views for their creators. If you post a dog video there that goes viral you can get paid. If you post regular content and build up your base then there's a light at the end of the tunnel where you can actually make a living doing what you love and now Minds has done the same thing with the introduction of Minds Pro.

How to use Minds Pro

You MUST create original content. My channel does a lot of news aggregation so I basically copy/paste and leave a comment about my thoughts. All of this means nothing because it's not original content. However, I've also been doing the Interviews On Minds series and I've been boosting it 5 tokens (max) every day.

Over the last 30 days I've had 250k impressions on my entire channel but only 4k page views from all that boosting (and all the time I put into creating those interviews.) This would equate to a $4 payout for the entire month in exchange for all that time plus (30 X 5 tokens = 150 tokens).

It's an uphill climb but you have to upload original blogs, videos, or images and then boost them or, even better, share them on your main social media pages so people come here to see them.

Blogs – I have some blogs that have received insane likes, views and reminds. If you're a good writer and are willing to save your tokens, write a great blog, and then boost it with all your might and you can potentially get a lot of traffic. Page views are worth $1 per 1,000 views and if you stimulate the conversation than you can get repeat impressions. My best Blog has 2,500 likes, I don't know the number of views but I likely spent 100 tokens boosting it so you do the math.

Video – Most users don't make video but if you have followings on other networks then you can direct that traffic here and when they watch your video that you've uploaded here you earn a view. If you're a content creator here with a large YT following this is a great way to offer exclusive content and link your Minds referral code to all your people. Each one who signs up is worth a dime but I'll get to that in the next section. Honestly, a video of a dog doing nothing special can get 1,000 views, just ask Willie Levee

Images or Memes – If an image simply comes up in the news feed and gets views, comments or reminds it does not earn page views. Understanding this, the only way to really get views for images would be to upload the image here and then share that link out to other social media sites to force people to come to your page to see it. If you do this MAKE SURE to drop your referral link in the description. This could potentially add up quickly if you're a genuine Meme Lord or Artist.

Your Minds Pro Profile Page – This is where you drive traffic and every view counts. Subverse, the news channel that Tim Pool just launched, is a great example of what anyone can replicate. https://subverse.net/ If he's driving an entire news agency towards this then he's figured out a way to monetize a start up business for $50 a month. Pretty slick and I must say that many other companies will eat this up. Subverse just raised a million dollars and they're using Minds Pro as their home base. That says something.

How to make money

There are three main ways to make money and they are referrals, commissions and views. The first has to do with referring people here through your link which can be found at Settings > Referral. Every person who signs up to Minds and actually uses the site will earn you Ten Cents so if you can drive a lot of people here this can add up over 30 days.

The second way is to hope that some of the people you refer purchase tokens or, even better, they sign up for Pro. Either way, you will earn a 25% commission for anyone who comes to Minds and spends money here under your referral link. For some people this can be an amazing way to actually go hit the street and recruit real influencers to come to Minds Pro under your referral link. 

And the final and most important way to earn money is through good old fashioned views. The first thing to understand is the difference between an impression and a view. Lets say I find a great meme on BigTech and I upload it on Minds and it goes viral. It gets 500 reminds, 500k views and 50 comments. Unfortunately, these views would be seen as impressions as very few people would actually click through to the page where it lives, thereby triggering an actual page view. But if I had 100k twitter followers and directed them all to come over here to see my meme I could maybe get 5k page views, or $5 from one tweet if they all actually click through to my original post for the meme.

Every 1,000 page views are worth $1 up to 100,000 views, at which point you'll earn $5 for every 1,000 views up to a million views. At this point the payout goes back down to $1 for the remainder of any given month. You basically need 50,000 views a month to break even on this, if you get to 100k page views you earn $50 over the cost. Then the next 900k views are worth $5 each. Which means that if you can get one video to have a million plays in a single month on Minds it would be worth (100k X $1) + (900k X $5) = $4,600. When I mentioned at the opening that YT got huge because the users got paid if they went viral this is what I'm talking about.

The bottom line is that there are ways for people to make money, especially if they have large following on other platforms or have connections to influencers. This system is heavily designed to reward people who can bring other people to the platform.

What it costs - Minds Pro costs $50 a month to join which has frustrated most users I've spoken with, me included. My 'page views' for the last month amount to a payout of about $4 with 17,000 subscribers and a regular placement on the top ten channels.  I have to admit that the only reason I have that many views is because of the Interviews on Minds series I'm doing and that fact that I've boosted them for 5 tokens every day for the last month. Had I not done that I would be looking at pennies. But there is hope.

How it can benefit regular users – Regular Minds users will want to share their affiliate link at Settings > Referrals as often as we can, just in case some whale signs up under your link. It would be nice if Minds set us up with a way for us to know if something like this happens so we can be aware that there is a potential earnings so we can drop the cash and get paid out but this is still deep in Beta.

It's also important to note that the supply of off chain tokens seems to be under control and even becoming scarce. I suspect that they will start earning their true value soon. This is probably where the average user can really cash in, I wrote a blog about the true vale of a Minds token here and I stand by it today because it doesn't fluctuate and the more rare they become the higher their value.

How to get paid out – There three options Stripe, Ether and Bitcoin. I would highly recommend the crypto options as Stripe has a proven track record of failure when it comes to censoring anyone to the right of Stalin so you just don't want your personal information associated with them under any circumstances. If anything, Minds is just signing up with them so they can get some good press when they eventually bans us.

The Minds Pro Home Page – It's really too early to talk about this as I haven't seen the back end. I'm not a huge fan on first glance, likely because this is so new that no one knows how to configure it yet so most of what I'm seeing so far are default pages. So far it is very foreign to a regular Minds profile page so you feel like you left the site all together in most cases but that could be a positive if you design it to push your original content. The jury is out.

Conclusion

When all is said and done, Minds Pro is a big gain. I know a lot of people (me included) are frustrated that there's no way we'd even consider this but we can still use our referral links to recruit people. We can create original content and boost it, we can save our tokens up for the day that they reach their true value and we can just keep on keeping on at being a great community of people that anyone would love to be a part of.

If everyone promotes this we can see the site grow by leaps and bounds and even an aggregator of news like me could possibly make a living off the tokens at 20 or 40 a day at $1 each, which is pretty damn cheap for any known CPM, plus all the views and referrals we'll potentially earn over time through Pro. There is a light at the end of the tunnel here on Minds where we can potentially make a living if we position ourselves correctly. It will just take a while for us regular users. Like anything in life, this is an uphill battle. But if we all get behind it we can make it work and we can thrive.