If you haven’t heard already, Blasting News has made changes to its payment model. After just six months of a supposedly successful $3 minimum, the site owners have scrapped the minimum guaranteed amount.
The new model is supposed to be better for writers, but it will actually work out worse. I wanted to update the original Blasting News review, but it’s just much easier to create a new one. As of now, I don’t recommend it at all for any writer.
If you would like to read my previous Blasting News review, you can. This review shares more about what Blasting News is and previous thoughts on the site.
Note that this is my honest opinion of the site and the payscale after almost a decade freelance writing.
This Was Supposedly Voted for By Writers
I will make a point in saying that Blasting News gave writers a chance to vote on two options for a new payment model. It either remained the same or introduced the chance to earn residual income from the first view. This second model removed the $3 guaranteed pay, as it was possible to earn money right away.
For Social Blasters, this is great. There’s no need to get the 150 views to make sharing other people’s content worthwhile. Why do I say this? Because it seems that Social Blasters are the ones who help to push for the new model. Writers on the site made it clear publically in the Blasting News Facebook group that they wanted to keep the $3 minimum guaranteed payment.
Apparently getting rid of the minimum payment was a vote from the majority. We haven’t been shown any figures to prove that, even when asked. Blasting News isn’t open to its writers.
Write Your Way to $1,000 Per Month and More!: Support Your Family With Your Writing Income
Write for Pennies Unless You’re Lucky
Quite honestly, unless you’re lucky to get a Social Blaster to pick up your content (and you have to hope that you’re writing about content they like to push out), you’re going to struggle to make a good amount of money on the site.
There’s still the view that an ads not from the United States, the United Kingdom, and a few other select countries aren’t worthy enough to give you a decent income. The US ads will generate you about a penny a view for social views (anything from social media) and less for generic views (views from anywhere else).
I haven’t even worked out the pittance the site pays for ads from anywhere else. It really isn’t worth your time. For the record, I’ve never agreed with this.
I also don’t believe the system is actually set up properly for counting the views. I find it odd that I can get thousands of views from other sites but very little from Blasting News. That tells me the site isn’t ranked very well. I’ll put my effort into sites that actually pay me properly for my content and respect me as a writer.
Of course, you will get money from the first view you may now. So, there’s no longer the hope that you’ll make 150 views, but it will still take time to get to that $3. It takes more work than just creating an article and getting that weekly pay.
Lower Minimum Requires to Request Money
There are a few positives, but they don’t outweigh the negative changes. Two of the biggest benefits is that the minimum needed to request your pay each month has been lowered from $50 to $10. That amount can also be requested every fortnight, rather than just once a month.
The amount you can earn per article has also been increased to $1,000. I’m not sure how many were making $500 per article, but there seem to have been some. The news still stops earning after 30 days (although Blasting News will still earn from views, of course). This is something I’ve never agreed with.
I didn’t really recommend Blasting News for writers the first time, but I definitely don’t recommend it for now. It’s odd that a site would have to make a chance just six months into what is apparently a successful payscale. This tells me that the payscale wasn’t successful at all and they wanted to bring in a chance that the writers had a say in (so the blame could be put on writers). I’ve stopped writing at the site and you won’t see any content with my name on it anymore. I’m voting with my feet.
Do you write at Blasting News? Have you chosen to leave after the latest change? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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Which website you recommend for writing and earning good money. What according to you is better then blasting news?.
I can’t say which sites are good, because there are a lot of factors at play. I’ve just created this list of Blasting News alternatives though:
http://www.alexandria-ingham.com/blasting-news-alternatives/
I made the mistake of joining Blasting News without first looking it up, but when I watched the welcome videos I started to question it and found myself here….now I just need to find out how to leave, but the layout of the site is awful. Do I just not write anything?
Sorry for the delay in replying. Yeah, you can just not write anything. I think there’s an email somewhere around so you can get them to take your profile down. I’m not 100% sure, though.
I quit Blasting News because I’m 100% certain they are cheating writers. I wrote there off and on for 18 months. I would write an article and share on FB and social media and see that it was blowing up yet the #s were misaligned. So to test them, I used a tracking link when I shared in Facebook groups so I could clearly see how many people were clicking the articles. It was a google link so it was only tracking unique views, which was what Blasting should be paying on… The google tracker was showing uniques 5-7x (sometimes more) higher than what Blasting’s internal mechanism showed which of course is proprietary and utterly non-transparent or reliable. When I went to management with my concerns and showed them tracking link results versus their internal tracking results, they made excuses and would never explain. My feeling was they couldn’t explain because they are overly-scraping traffic. They promise $20/1000 social views which seems great. But if they are cheating writers by scraping off 75% of the uniques, they are, in effect, paying $5 at most per 1k views which is typical, not remarkable… I made decent $ from them in the past, but you could tell when they starting manipulating #s because income dropped for no reason when traffic (by all indicators) remained consistent coming off of social media.
I also read your Inquisitr reviews. I was one of their top writers and was making, just before I left, $1500+ a week from them. They began firing writers in droves, then offered others lowball flat $10 a post (or less) but demanding very high volume. They made me a higher offer after weeks of negotiations and conversations to stick around which was still laughably low so I walked. You can see how their Alexa ranking has tanked since they ravage the writers’ pay. It’s clearly not working out for them and I’m certain they’re on borrowed time.
I moved back to more corporate work which pays more and is reliable. Enjoy your blog! Best of luck!
Thanks so much for your reviews. I don’t know why but I never thought about using a Google link to track my views! I knew something was fishy with the Blasting News system, so thanks a lot for confirming that for me! Ah, Inquisitr. I was one of their top writers for a while but that site has really gone downhill. I agree that they are living on borrowed time. There are only a few of these sites I see growing and they give me access to the Google Analytics for some, so I get to see the actual growth. Now that’s transparent.
I have a lot of writer friends that were displaced when Inquisitr slashed stuff. I started up a site for soap and reality TV that I set up as a writer’s cooperative where the writers get 50% of everything that comes in. I have never run a site before so it’s kind of an undertaking but with everything else falling apart, I felt like it was a chance for the writers to sort of control their own fate. Fortunately, my hubby is a programmer so I have a tech guy in-house to do the stuff that I couldn’t do if I was just a writer on my own.