What is Guild?
Guild is a new internet service that works on behalf of its members to generate revenue from visitors to any of the member websites. What Medium is doing for writers who publish on Medium’s site, we are doing for independent website publishers — collecting money from viewers and distributing it to publishers.
Can anyone join?
Anyone with a website can apply for membership but only those that meet our standards will be admitted, and we reserve the right to refuse membership to anyone even if they do meet those standards.
What standards does my site have to meet?
We apply a set of objective and subjective standards. The objective standards are based on an audit using Google’s Lighthouse tool for performance, responsiveness, and other factors. For some cases, such as specialized interactive sites, we may waive certain requirements. Our subjective standards are based mostly on a checklist covering things like offensive content, plagiarism, accessibility, etc. We make a final acceptance decision solely at our own discretion to protect Guild’s reputation.
Once approved, is my membership guaranteed forever?
No. We will be frequently reviewing Guild member sites to ensure that they are continuing to meet our standards. If we uncover problems, we will notify you and you may lose your membership.
Does this work for rich interactive content sites?
Yes. In fact we encourage sites to use the latest web technologies to create the best possible experience for visitors. You are not constrained by many of the rules that ad networks impose on publisher sites. You are required, however, to ensure that the Guild experience for visitors is not affected by your site — i.e., that Guild paywall pages and the Guild stamp are visible to visitors in the expected way.
How much will I earn?
You get 35% of the net proceeds from all visitors who purchase a pass on your site. And you share in 50% of the net proceeds from all visitors to your site who have a Guild pass. Guild retains the remaining 15% as a fee to run the network.
Assuming about the same number of visitors who purchased passes on your site visit other sites as the number of visitors to your site that purchased a pass elsewhere, this means that you will earn about 85% of the net proceeds from passes purchased on your site.
Let’s say that a visitor purchases a 3-month pass on your site for $3.00. The net proceeds (after credit card transaction fees) is $2.61. Guild takes a 15% fee, and if the assumptions described above are accurate, you will end up with the remainder — $0.91 immediately and an additional $0.43 per month over the next three months.
Estimate the fraction of your visitors who will purchase a pass. Then multiply this by your monthly unique visitor count.
Will the access price for visitors change?
Yes. As Guild grows, and therefore the value of an access pass grows along with it, we expect to increase the access fees. Our goal is that as membership grows, earnings for all members should be growing modestly at the same time.
Why don’t you offer a recurring subscription option for visitors?
We may eventually do that. But recurring transactions add complexity in a visitor’s decision making process. And while Guild pricing is changing, we concluded that it is premature to offer this option now.
Do you help me bring more visitors to my site?
Eventually we hope this will be the case, but don’t count on it. As a Guild member, you will be working in a consortium with other members. The Guild reputation will eventually result in consumers seeking out sites that are members. But it is better for you to think about Guild membership as being a way to monetize the visitors you are already getting.
Why should I get paid the same as other members if my site’s content is better?
The value of your content is reflected in the number of visitors you have and how engaged they are. This is already reflected in your share of the Guild proceeds.
When and how do I get paid?
Distributions are calculated monthly and will by distributed to your Paypal account each month as long as your balance is at least $5 on your statement processing date. Smaller amounts remain in your balance and roll over to the following month.
I’m worried that this might scare off my visitors. What should I do?
When you register your site, you have options about how we will (or won’t) interact with your visitors.
You can choose what fraction of your visitors to expose to Guild. You can start with a very low percentage and see how these people react to your Guild membership before exposing more. You might start, for example, with only 5% of your visitors. The other 95% will not see the Guild stamp on your pages and will never know that you are part of Guild.
Are you GDPR compliant?
Mostly. Guild complies with the General Data Privacy Requirements. We do not collect, track, or store individual data without explicit opt-in consent. We protect all data securely. And every user has the right to have data we are holding about them deleted. For more information, see our privacy policy.
Who runs Guild?
Guild was created and is operated by Hivepoint, Inc., a startup company located in Palo Alto, California.
How do I get help when I need it?
Contact us via email at support@guild.network.