After little more than two months of beta testing, our Referrals Program is now publicly open to any Triond user who has received at least one payment. If you still haven’t received any payment from Triond, you will automatically be enrolled in the program upon your first payment.

Referrals help you increase your Triond revenues simply by recommending Triond to people you know. You are assigned a unique link for your introductions. You can find this link on your dashboard – just copy and paste it for your introductions. When someone joins Triond after clicking your referral link, it will be associated with your referral.

Here’s a reminder for the program terms: You receive 10% of your referrals’ revenue (not including Google AdSense) for a lifetime. That is, we add the equivalent of 10% of your referalls’ revenue to your earnings, without subtracting anything from those users’ own earnings. On the Triond Dashboard, you can see how many referrals you have, and how much revenue you’ve generated through those referrals.

Payments for earnings earned through the last day of December 2009 were sent today. Please check your selected payment method for additional information.

All our PayPal payees who have accumulated more than $0.50 in the last month, check your PayPal account. If you’re a Western Union or check payee, and you’ve accumulated more that $50.00 in your account, we’ve sent your payment as well. The Western Union payees will receive an email with a transfer number soon. For those who receive a check, look out for a Triond envelope in your mailbox over the next couple of weeks.

Have fun, spend wisely and as always,

Happy publishing!

Update: due to the weekend, Western Users payees may have to wait until tomorrow to receive their transfer numbers. Please understand and sorry for the inconvenience.

Payments for earnings earned through the last day of November were sent today. Please check your selected payment method for additional information.

All our PayPal payees who have accumulated more than $0.50 in the last month, check your PayPal account. If you’re a Western Union or check payee, and you’ve accumulated more that $50.00 in your account, we’ve sent your payment as well. The Western Union payees will receive an email with a transfer number soon. For those who receive a check, look out for a Triond envelope in your mailbox over the next couple of weeks.

Have fun, spend wisely and as always,

Happy publishing!

We are happy to announce that after several weeks of testing and tweaking our Google AdSense integration, we are now ready to launch it publicly and make it available to our entire community of writers.

To be eligible for Google AdSense integration, the only requirement is that you have at least five text content items published. So, if you’ve published five articles or more, you’ll see the integration instructions on the top of your dashboard – or simply click here.

To learn more about Google AdSense integration, please read our previous post here.

Thanks to  some great initial feedback from early Referrals Beta participants, we have enhanced the referrals feature. Users who participate in the program can now view their referrals list in a new Referrals tab under the Community section. This will help users who wish to support and promote their referrals and their content know who their referrals are.

Some clarifications about applying for the Referrals Beta program:

• The only way to apply is to send an email to referrals [at] triond [dot] com using the same email address with which you are signed up to Triond. Comments on this blog post, emails sent from email addresses that are not recognized by Triond, and emails to Triond Support Team will not be processed.
• We are currently rejecting all applications by users to whom we have never sent at least one payment. Therefore, if you still haven’t been paid by us, wait until you do, and apply only then.

Thanks to all the beta participants, and keep applying – we still have available spots!

Many of you have been asking about the possibility of launching a referral program for Triond for some time now. A referral program is a way to compensate users for referring and signing up new users. Though user referral programs are common with other services that provide revenue streams for users (as means to increase revenue by creating a secondary revenue channel) we were quite hesitant towards launching one of our own.

Nevertheless, we decided it is time to do give it a try. So we decided to launch it in a “Beta” mode – i.e. in small and controlled scale that will enable us to see how it performs in reality, to get a true feeling of the advantages and disadvantages of running it, and to be able to make much more educated decision about whether or not to ultimately launch it in full scale.

So – here we go. The terms of the referral program are very straightforward: You get 10% on top of your referrals revenue for lifetime. This means that your referrals don’t earn less than they should. They earn just the same as they should and we add an equivalent of 10% of their revenue to your earnings. You’ll be able to see the amount you generate by referrals and the number of referrals you have on the Triond dashboard.

That’s it. Want to join? simply email “Sign me up” to referrals [at] triond [dot] com using the email address that is registered with your Triond account (so we can identify you), and we will consider your application.

Spots for this beta are limited, so if you want to participate – Hurry up!

The holiday season is heading our way, thank goodness it’s finally payday!

Payments for earnings earned through the last day of October were sent today. Please check your selected payment method for additional information.

All our PayPal payees who have accumulated more than $0.50 in the last month, check your PayPal account. If you’re a Western Union or check payee, and you’ve accumulated more that $50.00 in your account, we’ve sent your payment as well. The Western Union payees will receive an email with a transfer number tomorrow (Western Union delay is due to the weekend). For those who receive a check, look out for a Triond envelope in your mailbox over the next couple of weeks.

Have fun, spend wisely and as always,

Happy publishing!

As part of our ongoing efforts to ensure the best possible service, we’re starting a servers maintenance cycle. This cycle may result in some downtime for Triond.com and the publishing services (i.e. publishing may be delayed for a while).

Our content sites are less likely to be effected but it is still a possibility.

We apologize on any downtime. We will update you when the maintenance cycle is finished.

Update: A significant portion of the maintenance is already behind us. We are aware of some occasional “blank” pages, and stats graphs that are not yet loading properly. Publishing is still on hold as well.

Update: Publishing is now working again.

Update: “Blank pages” are gone and stats graphs are showing. At this point everything seems to be functioning properly. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any problems.

In the last few weeks, some of you have noticed that we have started experimenting with a Google AdSense integration. As the level of speculation rises, we would like to shed some light on this issue.

The integration is part of our efforts to provide new ways for you to earn more revenue from your work. Google AdSense is one of the most lucrative ad networks out there. However, it does not allow to conduct any type of revenue share on the revenue generated from its ads unless conducted in an integrative manner. This is the reason why we were not able to use it the way we’re used to with other ad networks (i.e. deal with it ourselves and save you all the trouble of dealing with it yourself). Then again, we couldn’t ignore it’s potential so we decided to hand the choice of either using it or not to each and every one of you.

The reason the integration is being unrolled slowly is to enable us to thoroughly test it on increasing scales. We have allowed a few Triond users access to it so they can help us test it, and more users are being (randomly) enrolled every day. Once we feel the integration is running smoothly, everyone who published at least three textual articles will be enrolled and be able to sign up if they wish to.

In order to participate in this program, you will have to either associate your existing Google AdSense account with your Triond account or create a new one, and therefore you’ll have to agree and obey to Google AdSense Terms and Conditions.

If you choose to participate, Google AdSense ads will be served to several ad spaces in your pages instead of some of the ads that are currently being served, while the other ads will remain. This means that no additional ad space will be allocated on your pages.

Since the Google AdSense ads will be served on behalf of your Google AdSense accounts, Google AdSense will be responsible for paying you those ads revenue, not Triond. For your convenience, we will synchronize earnings data from Google AdSense into Triond on a daily basis, so you will be able to view your Google AdSense earnings in your Triond account along with your Triond earnings. Please remember that although this data is presented to you in your Triond dashboard, we can not guarantee its accuracy, and in any case, the data that you see in your Google AdSense accounts is the most valid one.

Since we’ll omit some of the ads on your pages in order to make room for Google AdSense ads, the portion of your payout that is paid by Triond may be slightly lower than before. But once you add the Google AdSense payout to the pile, your total earnings will be higher, as we will optimize the use of Google AdSense ads and serve them only to those locations where they generate more revenue than other ads.

You should also remember that Google AdSense has different payout thresholds than Triond. They also employ a different set of payment methods, and pay according to a different schedule than Triond.

Also be aware that Google AdSense splits the payout 50/50 between Triond and you, so in essence, the revenue split is the same as with other ads managed by Triond. The difference here is that Google AdSense pays your portion directly to you, while with other advertisers, Triond collects earnings from them and then splits 50/50 with you.

We hope that things are clearer now, and if you haven’t already seen the Google AdSense integration enabled in your account, you will soon.

We’re currently experiencing outage of some of our sites. Our tech guys are on it. Hopefully it will all be solved soon. Stay tuned for updates.

UPDATE: All sites are operating normally again.