eefoof dev blog

Preliminary July 2006 earnings and hits are calculated! Go to "My Account" -> "My Profits" to see your earnings for the month of July.

We will shortly enable a new 'Request Payment' button for those who have met the $25 threshold. For those of you who did not -- no worries, your earnings will roll over month after month.

Please report bugs using our contact form.

Two weeks since the last update and we are nearing the completion of our first month of operation. And we all know what that means...... $$$$$$

Here are some things to keep you updated as we get ready to start making payments:

• It may take a few days to consolidate the profits earned between our three different ad agencies, into a single paypal account which has been opened for the specific purpose of issuing payments to users -- please bear with us
• To calculate your earnings for the month of August we will have a revamped page under "My Account" -> "My Profits" that allows you to select the month for which you want to see earnings. In that specific month you will see how much profit the site made as a whole from advertising, and how many hits we received. This will equate to a dollar value per hit. For example it might say that for the month of December, a hit was worth $0.01. Then you will see a listing of your media and how many hits it received during that month, and the calculated earnings
• On this new page you will also be presented a button that says "Request Payment" -- upon clicking this button you will be prompted for the paypal id (email address) you would like us to the send the money to. This is assuming you've accumulated more than $25 total in earnings.

The above updates will take place within the first week of August. It will take us a bit to consolidate money and have it ready for distribution within the new eefoof paypal account. It will also take a few days to work out the kinks in the new [My Profits] section on our user control panel.

Remember this is our FIRST month / payment cycle -- we're still in beta, please be patient :)

In other news, we've made some great improvements to the site:

• UBER UPLOADER! We've ditched our old buggy submission system in exchange for the famous uber uploader -- this thing rocks. Hope you all like it, please report bugs to us via the contact us page.
• With the new uploader, we've also made it so that you can send a custom thumbnail regardless of media type. A lot of people requested this because they wanted to send a special thumbnails for their videos (instead of the automated ones), and also to customize audio submissions, instead of the default audio icon. Also note that you can upload a custom image thumbnail, these would normally be a scaled down version of the main image that was uploaded. Let us know if you think this opens up too much room for misleading viewers and we'll disable custom thumbnails for 'Images'
• Improved Navigation! No more does media open in a new window when you click to view it. It now opens normally. The trick was getting the back button to take you back to your previous position in the media gallery. We've put some code in place to remember where you last were looking and take you straight there when using the back button.
  
• I recently did a radio interview on the topic of video blogging / online videos. Let us know what you think on the forums.
  

Here are a few tidbits of news and info from the past week:

• Despite eefoof.com being in 'beta' we are tracking all your media hits as well as ad revenue being generated. As promised, at the end of the month payments will be made to those who reached at least $25 for the month of July. Please read this forum post to obtain all necessary information pertaining to payments and your profits. Also see the blog post below this one.
  
• We've implemented a full private message system / inbox. On the upper-right corner when logged in you will see inbox(#), # being how many unread messages you have waiting. Private message [pm] links have been placed on all media pages and forum posts.
• We were featured in the Wall Street Journal for a recent article on online video sites.
• We have no idea who these guys are, but we love their eefoof.com commercials.
• Now when you're browsing the forums and use the search bar in the site header (upper-right), your query will search the forums instead of media galleries.
• Reporting content as [not author] (for people claiming to be author) will prompt you to provide a link to the original content, so we can verify that it has indeed been stolen from somewhere else. The same goes for when you report something as [duplicate] you will be prompted to provide a link to the original.
• Please take note of the new DISCLAIMER and RULES on our media submissions page.

Our new "suggestions" subsection of the forums have been a great success. We read our forums and strive to implement well thought-out suggestions which will benefit all our users. Here is a list of what's in the works:

• Uber-Uploader Submissions. We know the current AJAX uploader is prone to error, so we're rewriting it using the rock solid uber-uploader, which provides a progress bar and progress info which far exceeds our current setup.
• 5-Star (TV) rating system -- only logged in users can vote, and one vote per user per media item
• Our current AJAX Gallery view (browsing media thumbnails) is not 'back-button' friendly. We recently made media open in a new window when you click to view it. We did this because the back button did not work correctly when media opens in the same window. This is due to the technicalities of AJAX. We're working on a method that will allow users to view media in the same window (no popping up new windows), while preserving back-button functionality. I can't wait for this one.
• When uploading a Flash movie, you are able to send along a thumbnail image to be used. We're adding this functionality to Audio submissions as well.

As always, let us know in the suggestions forum if there are more features you would think would enhance the site.

Just wanted to chime in with the weekend updates and hopefully answer some questions about the site.

It seems that the vast majority of questions have to do wtih payments: when will I be paid? how do I know what my earnings are? 100 hits is how much money?

• We tally hits and payments at the end of each month.
  
• Earnings are all a percentage basis, compared against media-type ad revenue. For example, video hit percentages are calculated against overall video hits and overall video ad revenue. Thus you cannot know how much your media has earned, until the end of the month when we know how much ad revenue each media type generated.
• Based on the above, there is no flat-line ratio of hits/$$$.

To illustrate this, I'd like to share an email I received from a user today:

-----Original Message-----
From: user
Sent: Sunday, July 09, 2006 9:34 PM
To: admin@eefoof.com
Subject: General inquiry

yeah i was wondering exactally how you pay...i have exceeded the "$25" doller amount....and you said that i could get paid....how and when? cuz i am pretty sure i should be paid now...thankyou, and please get back to me

-User

and my response:

How have you exceeded the $25 dollar amount when we haven't tallied our advertising revenue for the month?

Read the Welcome page again. You get a "percentage" of our ad revenue. Meaning if we get $10 in video ad revenue for the month, and say you have a video that accounts for 20% of our video hits, that means your video accounted for $2, we keep $1 and you earn $1.

Without our finalized end-of-the-month ad revenue, it's impossible to calculate your earnings.

Finally, at the end of the month, we will issue payments via paypal.

Thanks!
-Matt

I hope that clairifies things for everyone. In other news, here are the recent additions / features added to the site:

• Comments! A full commenting system is now in place. Please keep it clean and appropriate.
• We've recompiled our video transcoder to support more formats (mp4, 3gp)
  
• Moderators are now prompted to enter an email message to be delivered to users anytime they delete or change ownership on your media. This should give you a clear idea of why your media was deleted, or why we changed ownership.
• The Queue! Thanks to many wonderful volunteers, we've been able to implement a media approval queue. Once your media has been submitted, it must wait in the queue to be approved by moderators before appearing in the galleries. However, you can still link directly to your media while it's awaiting approval.
• Animated gifs used to go in the "Videos" section and were transcoded into flash video. The resulting videos were ugly and buggy. We've switched our images section to account for animated gifs, with much better results. So, animated gifs -> submit -> images.
• Finally, there was a discussion on the forums about what happens to deleted media. I.e. if my video is mega-popular and accounts for a lot of traffic, but I remove it before the payments are tallied, what happens? While it's technically feasible to account for and track deleted media, at this point it's not something we want to babysit. After the big red DELETE button is pressed, we don't want to anything more to do with your media. We don't want it taking up space in our database, we don't want it on our servers. We don't want to be responsible for tracking its hits for 1 week 2 days and 3 hours. Often media is deleted because of inappropriate or pornographic material, we don't want any more record or association with this. So -- if you're planning on deleting content that has racked you up significant hits for which you think you'll earn some moola, wait until you've been paid before removing it.
  

PS - Ratings will be here, soon.

Welcome to the official eefoof.com development blog. Here we will be providing updates on what's going on behind the scenes and the future of eefoof.com.

I'll start by introducing myself and explain my role a bit at eefoof.com. My name is Matt Farley and I'm from Sacramento, California and have been doing web development for the past five years.

A few weeks ago I was approached by my good friend Kevin Flynn (Comrade Flynn) who asked if I could help him realize his vision for a media-sharing site which would reward authors and contributors by sharing ad revenue generated by site traffic.

Fast forward to July 3rd and we saw our official beta launch achieve tremendous media coverage and was an overall success.

Thanks to a great staff of volunteer moderators we are able to concentrate on fixing bugs and developing the features that everyone’s requesting. I’ll try to address some of the top issues here:

• We use an open source media encoder to transform your uploaded videos to a standard flash format. Sometimes your videos don't work because of various compatibilities. We're working very hard to iron these out and provide support for a wide range of formats. Please bear with us as we continue to improve this process.
• We hear you loud and clear -- a commenting system is on the way.
• Ratings are in the works as well.
• We've instituted a media queue, where your media must be approved by moderators before it will show on the front page. They will be looking for inappropriate videos, photos and verbiage in your tags and descriptions. They also look for people who have marked stolen / copywritten material as their own original work. If they see such media they mark it as "not original." If you feel they've revoked your ownership in error, please email and let us know.
• Currently we're having you send animated gifs to the "Videos" section. Unfortunately this isn't working out to well, as they usually get slaughtered in the transcoding process. We will soon have them back in images and will make sure they retain their animation.

If you notice any bugs or have suggestions please feel free to post on our forums or shoot us an email.

-mdaddy