Squidblog

Thanks for all the public discussion about Squidoo. All this blogging has sort of blown us away–we’re thrilled that people are so interested in what we’re up to.

There are two questions that seem to come up the most.

How will we resolve which lenses show up?

Wikipedia has a system with one entry per topic. We don’t. Instead, we encourage multiple lenses on a topic. Then, we use an automated algorithm to rank the lenses. We look at user ratings, lensmaster reputation, clickthrough rates, frequency of updates and other factors and give the lens a number. And we make it clear to the lensmaster what her rank is and how to improve it. If we do our job right, every time you do a search, we’ll choose the best lens from among the relevant matches and show it to you. Of course, it’s easy for a surfer to see all the lenses, not just the highest ranked one.

How will lensmasters get paid?

There are two columns in a lens. The column on the left features your content. And you’re welcome to include as many affiliate modules in this column as you like. (An affiliate deal is a revenue share with a store like Amazon. They pay a commission on sales). We set up all these deals for you (with thousands of merchants) that pay commissions and a portion of that revenue is credited to you. The right hand column features one small box with keyword advertising in it. That revenue goes into a pool and is distributed to lenses based on traffic and other factors. The details of our revenue-sharing will be as transparent as we can make them, and as the beta progresses, we’ll go into all of the ins and outs with our lensmasters.