Earn money with the website: Thanks to VG Wort

Treasure trove

This article is from 2008 from the private blog of straightvisions founder Matthias Bathke. In the meantime, the former blog no longer exists. However, since this article still functions as a source on some websites, we continue to make it available here.

So it is possible after all: earn money with the weblog, without advertising, without paid contributions. This is because VG Wort has offered an additional remuneration system since 2007, with which public texts on the Internet are also remunerated.

To do this, you must register online with VG Wort(manual), fill in the required data and also submit a signed document by December 31 at the latest. of a year (the postmark applies) to VG Wort.

If you miss this deadline, you have no choice but to be patient for another year: VG Wort only accepts applications for the following year. However, once registered, there is no need to repeat this process.

However, it is only worth registering if you meet the following requirements:

ยง 25 Online publications

  1. The share of the revenue from CD and DVD burner royalties attributable to online publications is distributed to the authors and publishers who have registered their works with VG WORT.
  2. Only works that provide evidence of a minimum number of accesses will be considered. For this purpose, VG WORT provides authors and publishers with a digital marker.
  3. Online publications that have copy protection cannot be considered for distribution.
  4. The Board of Directors decides on the minimum size of a work required for notification, the minimum number of accesses, the amount of the distribution, and the division of the distribution between authors and publishers.

(Source: Distribution Plan Science)

If one is then activated, the corresponding articles can be registered. It is irrelevant how long ago the article was published. Unique content also does not play a major role for VG Wort: If the article is mirrored on different websites or split into individual subpages, these can be tracked together. For tracking on websites, VG Wort offers a counting GIF that documents the calls. PDFs do not cause any problems either, since a corresponding forwarding link takes over the counting. Only the users’ country of origin plays a role: Only visitors from Germany are counted. For all texts except poetry, a minimum number of characters of 1,800 (including spaces and special characters) applies.

The remuneration

Remuneration is paid annually via a crossed check, sometimes with some delay: the distribution for 2007 will not be made until the end of October 2008 – German thoroughness. However, this remuneration is not unique per text: every year, when an article gets over the required minimum number of visitors, it is remunerated again. For 2007, VG Wort has set the following remuneration levels:

  • Contributions to which 1500 to 2499 sessions were counted between January 1 and December 31, 2007, will receive an allowance of EUR 30.
  • Contributions to which 2500 to >= 3000 sessions were counted between January 1 and December 31, 2007, will receive an allowance of EUR 40.

Different numbers apply to publisher and certain organization pages.

The practical test

PC-Intern.com is one of the first websites to use the new VG Wort remuneration system. The administration panel for submitting publications is somewhat idle with many articles. VG Wort does provide an interface for mass submission of texts, but a live interface still does not exist. Currently, the VG Wort terms of use must also be reconfirmed each time new texts are registered. It would be better just to reconfirm should anything have changed in the NL. Overall, the VG Wort website seems very confusing, which is probably also due to the historical growth of the site. In addition, it is not possible to determine via the VG Wort Panel how many visitors have already called up a publication in each case. All in all, however, the effort is worth it: if you manage to generate 1500 clicks at 1 cent each via Google Adwords, for example, you pay a total of 15 EUR, but already receive 30 EUR from VG Wort. So you get 15 EUR + 1500 visitors per article for free. This does not include any advertising revenue generated by the additional visitors.

Conclusion

Overall, there seems to be a lot of potential in VG Wort compensation. Due to the low hurdle of 1500 visits per year per article, even smaller websites and blogs have the opportunity to benefit from the compensation. It will be exciting if larger publishers also adopt the model. For at present, the millions in revenue set aside for Internet text distributions are certainly not being fully utilized. It would also be interesting to have an even more graduated remuneration, so that highly frequented websites would receive even higher remunerations.