How points work
The balance that keeps your content in the network: what earns points, what spends them, and where they come from.
Every client has a balance of points, and it is what keeps the exchange fair: your content is offered to other members only while that balance stays positive. Run out, and your site stops receiving traffic from the network until the balance is topped up.
What earns and what spends
Points move in four situations – two on your own site, two on other members' sites:
| What happens | Points |
|---|---|
| Another member's content is displayed on your site | +0.0001 |
| A visitor clicks a block on your site | +1.0000 |
| Your content is displayed on another member's site | -0.0002 |
| A visitor clicks through to your content elsewhere | -1.5000 |
Displays move the balance slowly, clicks move it sharply. The arithmetic is deliberate: hosting a block on your own site is what pays for the traffic your content receives from everyone else, so a site that only takes and never shows will drain its balance.
These figures are in test mode. The formula may change while the exchange is being tuned.
Where points come from
Each client receives a monthly grant that depends on the account's subscription:
- Trial – 50 points a month. Every new account starts here for its first month.
- Free – 10 points a month. The account moves to it once the trial month is over.
Paid subscriptions with larger monthly grants are planned, but not active yet.
Running out before the next grant
If a client spends everything before the next monthly grant arrives, you can spin the Fortune Wheel: open the client in Clients and press Fortune Wheel, or use the Spin Fortune Wheel button on the plugin's Main page.
A spin awards a random amount, from 0.1 up to 1 point – and several sectors of the wheel are empty, so a spin can also bring nothing. Spins are not unlimited either: after one the page tells you how long to wait before the next attempt.
Where to see the balance
The client's page in the dashboard and the Main page of the WordPress plugin show the same four numbers. The dashboard labels the balance Current and the plugin labels it Total, but it is the same figure: what the client has right now.
The other three are running totals for the whole life of the client, not for the current month:
- Replenished – everything that arrived from outside the exchange: the monthly subscription grant, wins from the Fortune Wheel, and any other top-up of the client.
- Earned – everything the site earned by showing other members' content and receiving clicks.
- Spent – everything the exposure of your own content has cost.
Where each screen lives is described in Main and Statistics in the plugin.