Let’s Talk: Rewards - When to submit and when not to

We design rewards to encourage members to share knowledge, experience, and passion, often asking you to do so via your connected social profiles.

But some members have a more specific purpose for their social media, especially aspiring creators who are trying to build a following focused on one form of content. If that’s you, submitting to lots of rewards can cause your social channels to appear disjointed.

Some members are embracing this by launching new variety channels, while others choose to remain focused on their niche.

So this week, let’s talk about this conundrum. Do you face it and if so how have you solved it? Do you prefer to remain focused on a few core communities, or do you try to engage as widely as possible? How do you ensure your submissions - viewed off-platform - align with what your followers want? What other factors affect your decision on when to submit to a reward and when not to? What can we do to help?

Created at 4:26pm, 7th March, 2025. Page last updated at 6:33pm, 10th March, 2025.

This post has been edited by the author for the following reason: Correction

Horror and Cats 3/8/2025, 12:07:56 AM

Typically I know the moment I read a Reward description if I'll do it because an idea springs to mind. Like for the Critter Cafe "make a critter IRL" Reward I immediately thought of making a snowball Mogbert and coloring him with Crystal Light powder lol.

If I DON'T get that immediate spark, I typically don't want to force something because I think it's really easy to sense a lack of passion/effort.

As for where to post things, I've gone with the "variety channel" approach. My main horror channel can house certain open ended reward entries, but the way I see it is a variety channel with Just in mind is essentially immediately monetized, so I don't have to worry about keeping the almighty algorithm happy.

Lanah Tyra 3/10/2025, 12:24:45 PM

I tried variety on my channels when Nightingale was around, but it didn't work, I was losing my usual audience. With the limited time I have to make content, I have to focus on my channel's usual topic.

I have a secondary channel for music related content, but not being able to link multiple channels is an issue. Currently the only option would be to change which channel I have linked but this causes problems, what if there are multiple rewards running and I would like to post to both and they would require the two different channels? But even if I would do submit wait until I get rewarded then change the channel and submit to the other one, if someone looks back on those reward submissions the channel wouldn't show up as verified, so they would then question why it was rewarded. So I don't want to do this, have to make a pick which of my channels to link.

I think the other problem is a lot of rewards are asking for new content. And you might have a recent content on your channels which would fit perfectly but you can't submit it, so need to produce a new one. I think this goes against one of the original ideas of the site, where it was about being able to share the content you do anyway and get rewarded for it, rather then making content asked for specifically for this site even though the content is hosted somewhere else.

So since there's very rarely something popping up in my niche which I can freely post on my socials without risking to lose my viewers the way I look at rewards is as commissions. So they are asking me to make this content. How long does this going to take me to make, how much I can potentially get paid for it, is it worth my time investment and putting it on my channels knowing that my submission might even not get rewarded, so then I effectively made this piece of work for free (since my channels are not monetised).

So unless the reward is related to my usual content and it benefits my own channel, I mostly just submit to text rewards if the topic interests me, but we have seen less text rewards lately.