(If you’re new to the Great TwiX Experiment, click here for Week 1.)

Yes, it’s closing rapidly on the fifth of November. No, the title isn’t a “V For Vendetta” reference. Woulda been cool if it was, though.

Right, so: Where were we?

Oh, yes! I’d just gotten paid. $20.71, for all my interactions between 31 January and 18 September. Not a lot, but then again, I hadn’t really done much of anything for six of those months. Deducted from this, of course, is $16 for two months subscription, leaving me with a $4.71 profit. Not much, especially considering all the hours of effort I sunk into composing snarky Replies in order to get my five million Impressions.

Turns out, though, I don’t get ad-share from Replies, only interactions on my own TwiX posts. Time to change my participation model, so I did.

I told you a bit about this last time. Instead of occasionally posting fun memes whenever I happened to be online, I began scheduling them in advance. I found that text-plus-picture got the best results in organic traffic, so that became my stock in trade. Ten a day, I found, maximized both Impressions and Interactions, though if I had anything I wanted to post for myself — an article, a new story, or a funny meme — I’d need to reschedule something that was already planned or risk smothering my own post.

The algorithm still militates against links, I’ve learned, and there’s no way around it. A post with a picture draws twice as many Impressions. One workaround I tried was to reply to my own post with a comment about how the algorithm hides links, and tacking on a random picture. It didn’t help much. The only thing that does help is to pin my most recent link to the top of my Feed; over time, people notice.

Twice, I did chained posts, and had mixed luck. The best results came from the one I mentioned earlier, https://twitter.com/Gnerphk/status/1706648089660891445. My Hallowe’en story fared rather more poorly: https://twitter.com/Gnerphk/status/1707601643947135055. I’m currently doing a very long excerpt from an even longer piece of original fiction; each new installment picks up a few hits, but it’ll be an underground hit at best. https://twitter.com/Gnerphk/status/1718825802790576607

Once, I did rather a long post on a pending social issue, and then quoted it as a comment on a few large political accounts. That got me quite a bit of attention and a few Follows, but it did very little for my fiction and other links. Mostly what it drew was blocks, though to be sure it was anti-partisan rather than in favor of either side. I took it back down after a couple of days, once the situation had passed. https://twitter.com/Gnerphk/status/1717438272828313757

Once I started getting a few hundred to a thousand organic impressions on my own feed each day, I figured I’d earn some payouts before long. Most of my posts only get seen by a hundred people, but an average of one a week gets between five and ten thousand. That’s not nothing, right?

Six weeks later: $13.35. $12 of that, remember, goes to pay the subscription.

By comparison, when I sell a short story it can earn a hundred bucks or more. TwiX payouts, at 100 Impressions to the penny, simply cannot compete. I’ve invested over two hundred hours building up a following, and by itself it doesn’t pay.

On the other hand, without social media, my articles get zero clicks. I’ve counted seventeen distinct individuals that my posts have directed to SciFi Shorts, which is nothing to sneer at since they publish a lot of my stories (though not at a hundred bucks a pop, unfortunately). TwiX has generated precisely one CoffeeLink donation on an article, but it also sends me as many link clicks as Facebook these days, whereas before the Experiment began I almost never got one.

Bottom line: It works, but not well.

My hope is to build up a small network of fellow SFS writers who will help promote the site, and to encourage the publisher to himself invest $8 per month into subscription fees. A few cross-comments should, theoretically, boost each of our posts in the algorithm, and between us we ought to be able to at least double the traffic at SciFi Shorts.

But I can’t do it alone.

Next article, I’ll hope to report on how this project went.

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