I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about social media but this morning I checked my feed on Steemit and 
Minds was more interesting because there were several ways you could potentially earn money. I actually signed up and tested it out.
Ways To Earn Money On Minds.com
The Affiliate program is looking pretty generous at 25% of the revenue they generate. They don't really say if there is a time line on that. Can you imagine if you could earn that on the lifetime of the accounts you referred? That would be pretty insane and I don't know if it would be sustainable because that is actually more than they keep on their ad revenue which we will go into in a moment. Here is my affiliate link though if you are interested in signing up. :-)
https://www.minds.com/register;referrer=brianphobos
The exclusive portion reminds me of Patreon where people can support you each month but it almost seems like they will get to see exclusive stuff that won't be posted other places. It is an interesting concept but I feel that will mainly work in a situation where you are giving money making advice like real estate or stock tips type content. Wire seems like it is where people can tip you but upon further exploration it seemed like that is a pay wall you set up so people can read your post. Ad revenue is interesting because the split is 80% for the creators and 20% for Minds. That is pretty good considering YouTube's split is 45% for Google and 55% for creators. P2P Boost sounds cool because it is basically like a sponsored resteem or retweet situation.
Monetizing Minds
So you have to apply for monetization and right away you get the ability to do the affiliate program. You have to put in why they should let you do the ad revenue portion. It says it might take up to 7 days.
There is a screen shot of the back end.
Points System
The points system to me seems kind of like the reputation system on Steemit or like Reddit Karma. I don't think it will have an monetary value in the future it is just a gauge of how engaged a person has been on Minds.
It almost seems like people can buy their 10,000 points for $10 each month. I'm not sure if this allows people to boost their posts more or what.
Ad Placement
Here is a look at a blog that was monetized on there and where the ad placement is.
Here is a look at the bottom of the post. There are more ads down there.
How Much Can You Earn?
Just keep in mind that most ad services like this are going to equate to $1 / 1000 views. It is tough to get that kind of traffic. Then you are taking 80% so you will basically get $0.80 for 1000 views. The 
If Minds got a lot bigger and a person wanted to manage a subscriber list on there where people paid each month for exclusive content someone could earn more obviously.
Another thing I wanted to note is that they had it organized so that a blog post was different then a regular status update or tweet type post which I thought that was interesting. Here is the blogging interface. Kind of similar to the way Steemit is.
Steemit Can Learn From Minds and Minds Can Learn From Steemit
Minds is open source but isn't blockchain based. Database driven sites have been around longer so there is a little more of a proven track record. I feel that is one of the reasons why Minds has some features that would be cool to see on Steemit. Steemit has to reinvent the wheel on a new technology. On Minds I liked the fact that there are groups and also that you can put banner art in your profile. It seems like simple things but people really like to have the banner art. I felt that the layout was very clean on Minds. Also Minds had an encrypted chat service built in.
Steemit has a huge advantage in that it has STEEM backing it and that there is an incentive to purchase STEEM and power it up.
If I Was Minds.com
- Since STEEM / STEEMIT is open source I would take that code and launch a new crypto based on it and distribute coins to people who have a lot of points already in their system. They could do an ICO launch and then distribute the coins and integrate the new crypto so that their user base would have an additional way to earn on top of the affiliate program, ad revenue, and pay wall content.
- The other option would be to integrate STEEM into their existing system but that becomes difficult and they wouldn't have a huge position in it like Steemit Inc and a lot of the early founders, miners, and investors. It makes more sense to launch their own chain.
If I Was Steemit.com
- Look at Minds.com for some inspiration and work towards some of the features they have like the encrypted messaging app, banner art for the profile, groups, ad revenue sharing. Minds also had their own video service which is interesting but will be best done in a decentralized manor through some type of thing the way Siacoin is trying to do. It is a tough challenge.
- I think it would be awesome if Steemit.com implements Ad Revenue in the future and then that way our content could have a way better lifespan if people are tripping across it organically from Google. It would be an additional revenue stream for us. People could opt out of it if they didn't want to participate.
- Really when it boils down to it though I can manually embed code into my blog for Ad Sense but personally I would want it to show up in there 30 days after I made the post. On Steemit it would be buried but for organic traffic coming in then it would still get the hits so it didn't piss off my followers here!
Conclusion
I actually thought Minds was interesting. I felt like their was way more free speech on there than on Steemit. It was almost intimidating on minds in some respects. There were social justice warriors and white supremacist posting stuff. I didn't agree with their posts but it was interesting to see all these different people posting. You don't really see that as much on Steemit. I like the Steemit community better actually from what I have seen. Steemit is actually pretty PG in my mind and I feel that it is partially because people are afraid to speak their mind 100% because they won't get a payout or it will be like committing a mild version of Steemicide.
On Minds there were also bigger organizations like NASA which I thought was interesting. On the flip side there were a lot of people who were kicked off of Facebook and Twitter for posting stuff that was too radical.
Personally I think that the content on Minds would scare off the majority of people in a lot of ways. I feel that people get scared away or frustrated by Steemit for different reasons.
Ultimately right now Steemit is a way better structure if you are looking to earn money to be honest. The one main play with Minds is the Ad Sharing but you have to get massive traffic for it to really become much of anything.
Overall Minds made way more sense than Yours Network and Synereo at this point and we can take some notes from their site.
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