Here we come up with another update about new things happening at Milyin.

It’s a new year, and before starting, let’s give you our greetings.

Happy New Year 2021.

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May this year be good for you, may you grow, stay healthy, and be prosperous. 

2020 is over, but the Pandemic is still not over, the new mutants of COVID are found in many countries recently.

We ask you all to Stay Home, Stay Safe, and wear a mask whenever you go out. 

Now let’s begin by discussing what has been happening in Milyin in the last six months.

Revenue

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It is a big one.

It is something that will profoundly impact every creator of the Milyin.

We have reworked our whole Revenue system. It entirely changes the way you earn money.

Earlier we used to have payments based on Views/Words/Images/Comments in Creations, we are abolishing all of it.

As we mentioned in our updated Creation Policy, with effect from January 1, 2021, you shall stop earning money via Views/Words/Images/Comments

If as a Creator you have total pending payments of more than $3 on 23:59:59 December 31, 2020, then you can get it credited to your account before January 5, 2021

If you have less than $3 in payments, your payments become 0 on January 1, 2021. You can appeal against it and we may consider releasing payments even if you are less than $3, you can contact us at creators @milyin.com.

But the big question must obviously that how “How will you earn on Milyin, after January 1, 2021?”

Well, we are proud to Introduce Monetization at Milyin

Monetization

First, let’s answer the big question here “Why is there the need to change the Revenue Systems?“

Here’s the Thing, for the past two years we have been paying Creators the same amount of money per 1000 views/words/images/comments.

Milyin earns its revenue from Ads, specifically Google AdSense now. We noticed that some Creators generate more revenue than others.

Some Creators can generate even $5-6 per 1000 views, however, others earn less than $1 per 1000 views.

We think it’s wrong to underpay quality content and overpay not-so-good content.

At the core, we are a company devoted to helping people create great content.

A big part of the people who create on Milyin doesn’t really want to earn.

And they do not want ads popping in their Creations.

So we solve both the problems with this simple solution.

We now allow Creators to decide the ads that they want in their Creation, we let them place the ads wherever they want. You have granular control. So if you don’t want ads you can do that, if you want the ads at a particular place you can select it too. If you want to give an Affiliate link for an Amazon India product you can do it easily.

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Monetization are tools developed by Milyin to make earning money on Milyin as simple as “1, 2, 3”

New Revenue methods allow you to customize your post and place Ads, Affiliate Links, and Promotional Texts in your Creations. We will pay you a definite revenue per click.

Creators will have access to Milyin’s new Creation Interface Monetization Tools that let you put up Ads, Affiliate Links, Affiliate Images, and Banners in your Creation as you like it.

You shall earn based on a Cost-Per-Click basis for Ads and Affiliates. Along with that, you get a percentage share of the revenue we get if we get a sale through you(You need approval before being eligible for percentage share)

We only consider one click per Revenue Type in 12 hours. Multiple clicks for a given revenue type on a given Creation counts as just one Click. But, you get the money (granted that you get approved before the sale) if the repetitive click converts an affiliate sale.

The 80% revenue of Affiliate sales is not available for everyone. It is membership-based. The Cost Per Click is available for everyone by default (unless we ban you), so you get $0.1 per click on ads and affiliate banners/ads/links/images when illegible. But, to get a 80% share of Affiliate sales, you need to write to us at creators @milyin.com for approval. Once approved, you can get 80% of the affiliate sales revenue that Milyin will receive from sales routed through you to our affiliate partners.

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Google Adsense provides no direct way for us to count clicks. And using an Indirect way to track clicks is against their Policies. Therefore AdSense clicks don’t appear on a per post basis on Stats Page. Even Daily Stats aren’t available for you. We are sorry for it, but it’s unavoidable as of now. You only get to know the total clicks of your entire account on the Stats page. No creation specific or day-specific stats for AdSense.

Also, the total clicks displayed can take a few days to update, we have to manually do that. Oftentimes it will be a few days late. But you can trust us, we get to see Google AdSense click counts on their dashboards, and we manually update it on your account every few dates. If in case you doubt the accuracy of clicks, you can always write us an email, and we will send screenshots from AdSense itself to you.

Stats

With so many changes in Revenue systems and new metrics to show in the Stats, we need to rework the way our Stats page and data collection Works.

It is still not complete and will take a few days to become perfect.

As a result Stats page is Temporarily down and will be available before the end of January, once we have finished all the changes with the Stats page.

The new Stats page will show Views, Words, Images, and Comments for each creation, along with Monetization Stats too. It would only include Bluehost and Amazon currently, we will show clicks per Creation for both of them.

Besides that at the end of the Stats Page right above the Daily Stats, we would have your Total AdSense clicks and Total Revenue through it.

Google doesn’t allow us to directly track the clicks, so we have to update the clicks manually, we do it every few days, so your actual click count might not reflect until a few days after the click.

Creation Guide

Creation Guide is really important for our Creators. It teaches them everything about Content Creation.

As we bring these new Monetization Tools, the Creation Guide is also in the works and is right on track and will show the latest information.

We earlier planned to release it together with our Monetization Tools, but as the stats page isn’t ready yet, and without Stats Page the Creation Guide feels a bit incomplete it would be much confusion, so we avoided it.

Updated Creation Guide will be available the Stats page is available again.

Hosting Shift

Milyin was running on Siteground Hosting services for about a year, It was time for us to upgrade ourselves, so we decided to Shift to Bluehost.

We Shifted to Bluehost on July 28, 2020.

In 2019 when we shifted to SiteGround, there were a few days of downtime. This year we tried to do thing possible to make sure high we had 100% uptime. 

And we very well did that.

Bluehost has been nice to us, it costs less, and gets things done nicely.

Our site performance has improved manifold in the past six months, we changed plugins, went back to basics, and this has been really helpful.

Bluehost’s Customer Support could not match Siteground but their wonderful tools and better features make up for it.

Plus this year we saw some unexpectedly high spikes in visitor traffic in November, Bluehost gives us unlimited bandwidth, which was a lifesaver during those days, as Siteground was incapable of holding that many visitors.

Speaking of Performance, Let’s discuss Site Speed.

Overall Achievements

We have had an year to work, and we are consistently growing and making progress.

Hard Work pays off, our efforts to improve our core site speed and performance has paid of well.

We were successful in reducing average loading times by over 2 seconds, which really helped improve our rankings

We are now having more Creators than ever before.

Infact in 2020 we had the maximum number of Users who Created atleast 1 Creation.

Our search rankings improved, and we have seen amazing year over year growth too.

We for the first time crossed 1 Million search impressions in a year.

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Design

Milyin really values great design, we believe that a great design is what makes people use a service/product.

We have constantly tried to improve our designs in newer and newer ways.

All our Creators love Dark Mode, it reduces Eye Strain, Looks Beautiful, and Saves Battery.

But we felt that the Dark Mode was too dark for AMOLED screens. We had made the Dark Mode a little brighter, 20% to be specific. It makes things perfect as of now for us.

Milyin’s Footer earlier used to be dark even in Light Mode, it was intentional and we liked the look as it helped to distinguish the Footer from the rest of the Creation Content.

But we found a problem. Milyin’s Header stays fixed to the top of your screen, and it has a little bit of transparency to it. The Background gets slightly blurred too, to create depth. 

But the problem is that this blur looks only good when Header and Background both are of the same color.

When we scrolled to Footer, the Navbar looked not-so-good as the background and Header had a color mismatch.

As a result, the Header is now Lighter.

The Last time when we discussed the updates, we announced our Massive Redesign to Creation Interface.

We constantly improved it. 

Scrolling top every time to get the Add Media button was a task, so we added another Add Media button right in our Creation Editor Toolbar. Full Screen is quite useful for those who create on Phones or smaller screens, so we considered adding it to the Toolbar as well.

In Full-Screen mode, you did not get the Save button and Add Media button earlier, which meant that you have to get out of Full-Screen mode every time you had to save your Creation.

It wasn’t a problem on Desktops as on Desktops you could easily use CTRL/CMD and S to save it.

But on Mobile it was a problem, so we added a Save button to the Toolbar also. 

Another issue born with it was the  “Your Creation has been Updated” not visible in Full-Screen mode.

So we built a new Creation Updated notification that pops from the bottom of the screen, that only comes when in Full-Screen mode.

Social Media

Social Media has never been our strong zone, partially because we believe in word of mouth, and also because it is not possible to effectively promote each Creation that gets published, promoting a particular Creation and ignoring the other one would be an unjust move.

We basically post the thumbnails with titles and depending on the platform, tags, and links too included in the text.

Due to some glitches and inconsistencies, Some posts were missing on some platforms and others were duplicates.

So we decided to clean all our Social Media accounts and start fresh. 

We deleted all old posts from all our Social Media platforms.

Performance and Optimizations

We have gone to our basics for performance, we had been using the Fast Velocity Minify plugin for quite some time and it was good.

But after much experimentation, we found that Autoptimize in conjunction with WP Super Cache delivered the best performance yet.

So on September 28, 2020, we reinstalled the Autoptimize plugin.

We used Above The Fold CSS for better paint times and Improving First Content Paint.

In 2020 Google made Web Vitals an important Ranking Factor, and while it’s still not a really big factor, we think all of the Web Vitals are really important for a great user experience on Milyin.

We had some really high Cumulative Layout Shifts.

Cumulative Layout Shift is the sudden jerk/shift in scroll positions after the Initial Page Load.

Tweaking our Lazy Loading and using Above The Fold CSS massively improved it.

Our scores have improved over 3x in Web Vitals in the past six months.

Our Thumbnails now load faster than ever before, as we adjusted their sizing according to users’ Screens.

While it can be a bit too technical for a random person, for the Creator’s we shall explain it in simple words it means that the time between the link click and your Creation becoming visible has reduced significantly. 

Once your Creation initially becomes visible (but is still loading images etc) the shift in the layout is minimum and barely noticeable, which improves UX.

And as Speed is an important ranking factor, we saw growth in our Organic Traffic too, Creations published before July 1, 2020, saw about a 20% boost in organic visits, thanks to better performance.

Layout Shifts and other things that contribute to a better overall user experience, these things are part of Core Web Vitals and will become more and more valuable in 2021.

We are also Deferring our JS and CSS files, which means JS and CSS files that aren’t very necessary on the first-page load, will not execute until all files are downloaded. These files get executed after all files get downloaded which shaves off a little loading time.

Progressive Web App (PWA)

Our Progressive Web App ran on a Solid foundation of Workbox and was really awesome.

But, it did not have any significant adoption, people do not like it a lot. But keeping it developing for a handful of people was not a great idea.

It’s better to focus on things that more people use and then come back and improve them once we have enough time to invest in them.

As a result, we have got back to the old practice of using a Plugin.

The Plugin saves the maintenance efforts and also is far more stable.

It gives us the chance to focus on more important things and increase the pace of development.

We surely will start the development once the user base increases, and we can expand the team to have someone dedicated to developing PWA.

We jumped back to our very old favorite plugin that we used initially for PWA.

We are using the Super Progressive Web Apps plugin again.

Downloadables

Downloadables on Milyin seemed like a great idea, but as it turns out, Creators never adopted it, in over a year has passed without any Creator trying it.

As a result, we decided to remove it from Creation Interface temporarily.

It makes no sense to show an option that the Creator doesn’t really need. 

But this doesn’t mean that it was a bad idea by any means.

We still like the idea, and we still are inclined to make it possible.

We are working on a new “Digitals” section in our Revenue Tools, This will allow you to be able to do what you did with Downloadables and many other things, and this time it may come as an option of Monetization Tools.

But this is pretty early in development, we can’t promise it to become real, and it’s still many months away from becoming real.

It was just our idea of what we think is the right way to implement it to make sure that Creators would use it. We believe that the idea was good, it was just executed poorly by Milyin.

So Digitals can be a better way.

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