As a webmaster facing the challenge of putting forth a new website to generate income, I came across a new concept in the field of blogging: joint effort revenue generation or JERG for short. JERG is a concept I made up after seeing this new phenomenon sweep through several established sites. It started out as being AdSense Revenue Sharing, but I took it one step further and coined it ?JERG?, because that is what this particular website profit generation endeavor really is. The basic premise is simple: display advertisements a certain number of times from the creator of the article content as well as the owner of the website. Some sites achieve a 50/50 display ratio. http://www.arscompendium.com is a good example of a JERG site with a 50/50 ratio. Other sites offer better, and sometimes worse, ratios to the writers too. It's up to a writer to do their due diligence and pick the site that best fits what they're looking in a profit generating site.
As of this summer of 2006, there aren't many sites devoted to JERG, but the wave of new sites is coming. It'll be up to the savvy webmaster to decide whether it's a surf he wants to catch or one that he wants to miss.
There are some inherent dangers with JERG sites. Most of them run either AdSense or Yahoo Publisher ads and share the ratio for the display between them. What a site owner MUST do to maintain the integrity of the site, is enforce a rule of no clicking for the writers of that blog on ANY ad on the website. It's a little extreme, but that rule will definitely cut out the chance that a writer would click on their own ads. In the eyes of the Google or Yahoo, this is a clear no-no. Click fraud hurts everybody. It would be rather unfortunate to have 1000's of dollars in income generation from legitimate clicks and then have your account banned due to inadvertent self-clicks. Google and Yahoo have both banned publisher accounts for this very reason, with no amount of apologizing being effective in any sort of way.
However, if the JERG concept works, then everybody benefits. The JERG site will grow in rich, unique content and search engines will eat it up with entrust it with better search engine results for visitor searches. Not only will the site grow, but the writers will be in the best possible position: receiving income from passive content they may have written months, if not years ago. What could be better than that?
But you need a group of quality writers, and you need to expose your JERG site to the best possible promotion tactics on the web. And above all, you MUST enforce the no-click ad rule for your writers. Without great, quality content and an enthusiasm to grow the site, all you have is a simple content management site.
