Of late we have been talking extensively about the monetisation efforts at Cucumbertown. Naturally this led to a few conversations around revenue sharing, percentages and so on. It became clear to me that we would need to make a revenue Terms of Service (TOS) for the Cucumbertown bloggers, so that everything connected to monetization becomes a seamless transparent process. But as Cherian had mentioned sometime back, the TOS is a time consuming effort, and we estimate that it will take us at least another three months to come up with the full terms and conditions of the revenue model.

So, I have written this in an effort to keep everyone updated on what is happening, without the limitations of legal parlance.

In very simple terms, the revenue share is in the ratio of 70:30 for all monetization efforts led by Cucumbertown, which currently is mainly ads and affiliates. Broadly 70% goes to the blogger and 30% goes to Cucumbertown. These percentages are consistent, regardless of a blogger’s geographic location. In my previous statement, I used the term ‘broadly’ because this is without including what your bank or an entity like Paypal may charge us to transfer the money earned to your accounts. We are figuring out how to do this in a way where the banks levy minimum charges for all transactions.

This brings me to, why we haven’t talked about the revenue shares till now. We were not in a position to say anything authoritatively, since there were a lot of new things that we had to learn in this process, including taxation.When there are 12–13 ad networks and their related revenues to manage, things have a way of getting complicated, and they have. But, after nearly two weeks of burning the midnight oil, now we have our own blogger Sujata Shukla, a chartered accountant helping us to sort out all these things. I have to admit here, there were some hiccups once the money started coming in, that we clearly had not foreseen.

For instance a few networks have remitted revenues to Cucumbertown India subsidiary accounts instead of the Cucumbertown US accounts. This creates an issue because all payouts need to be from the Cucumbertown US account to avoid any sort of double taxation.

We also need to figure out how long Cucumbertown will be holding the blogger’s revenue based on a minimum threshold of revenue. We are deliberating on this and soon will follow best industry practices. The main purpose of this research is to maintain minimum transaction charges. For e.g. transferring $100 once in three months compared to $33.33 every month would be cost effective.

And to keep the accounting and other processes simple,we are planning to fix on one mode of transfer (say wire transfer) for all bloggers till we streamline other flexible options including Paypal. We would reach out to bloggers for their details on separate emails for this process. Rest assured, confidentiality is paramount and we will abide by that.

That is the basic structure of our revenue plan. We will be having a full terms and conditions on the website soon, that can clarify more details. Besides this we are also planning to have quarterly updates on what’s happening with monetization.

If you have any doubts please feel free to contact me on shriniwas@cucumbertown.com. I’d be happy to answer any of your questions.