Understanding Squidoo Stats: Earnings, Payouts & Royalties

Right-Click the picture above and choose "Open in New Window" to view your dashboard and follow along with me in this tutorial.

View earnings statements at the BOTTOM of the "My Stats" pane, but let's take a look at the rest first. Note that with this and ALL Squidoo charts, you may hover your cursor over the chart to get info on one point.

This chart doesn't graph monthly payouts, but your cumulative TOTAL: how much you've earned since you started on Squidoo. I didn't make $996 in October '08; that's how much I earned in a year and a half!

Next is some account info. There are two things to note.

(1) View a table of the charity/cash settings for ALL your lenses by clicking Current payment settings for all lenses. When charities fail to maintain contact with Squidoo, they drop off Squidoo's charity list. Lenses donating to MIA charities reset to "Squidoo Charity Fund," a fund divvied up among all Squidoo's partner charities. Click a lens name to edit it and select a new charity.*

(2) The "Change Threshold" button doesn't link to the right spot! To change your Reserve Hopper threshold, go to the Payment settings under your Profile Tab. If you haven't earned enough in a whole year to meet your threshold, your Reserve goes to the Charity Fund.

*(Go to Squidoo Charity Central and scroll to the bottom for a list of all current Squidoo charities. Each is linked to a lens created by the charity to tell us about their work.)

Ignore the Lensmaster Referrals -- click on it and be disappointed. I've never gotten any referral bonuses either -- why do people join Squidoo, then not make any lenses?

Anyway, what you want is the Earnings Statements pulldown menus.

• "My Earnings" shows a lens-by-lens breakdown of payment sources: Ad Pool, Chitka Ads, Amazon royalties, eBay, etc.
  
• "My Payments" shows a lens-by-lens breakdown of payment recipients: you, or the charities you've selected.

If you select "Previous Payout," and "My Earnings", you get this What the Heck? Pie Chart.

if you hover your cursor over the chart, a popup tells you each ad source and what percent of your total earnings came from that source (Ad Pool, Amazon, Infolinks, Chitka on mine).

If you chose a "Time Period" of longer than a month, the pie chart is accompanied by a month-by-month chart. In fact, if you picked "Life to date," you'll get a month-by-month chart of all your payouts (with Paypal transaction fee already deducted).

With apologies for the pink panther scribbles, here's what you get when you select "My Payments" and "Life-to-Date":



See that tiny little icon at upper right? You can download a spreadsheet of your life-to-date Payments! It's in Excel format, readable by most spreadsheet programs. You can download Earnings Statements too, but only back to October 2009, which is when the current income breakdowns (Ad Pool, Infolinks, etc) started being tabulated.

There are two kinds of Squidoo statements: My Earnings, and My Payments. Let's look at Payments first.

I've snipped this statement so you can see the top, middle, and bottom.

This is a breakdown of who received payment from each lens, with your payments in the "Cash Paid" column, then charities.

The "Total paid in cash" listed at the top is your payout after Paypal's transaction fee is deducted.

The transaction fee is 2% of your total payout, up to $1. If you make anything more than $50, you're getting a transaction fee discount. If you want to be really stingy, you could set your Payment Threshold very high. For example, if you set it to $100, you'd still pay $1, which comes out to a 1% transaction fee.

If you didn't meet your Payment Threshold, your payout for this month will be listed under the "Reserve Hopper" subtotal.

How does Squidoo determine each lens payout? Let's review.

This is a random selection of earnings breakdowns from my last payout. The list is arranged from top earning to lowest-earning lenses.

What's all this tier mumbo jumbo? Remember what I said about how you can "opt out" of certain kinds of ads, which rejiggers the tier payouts for that particular kind of ad.

For instance: the "Ancient Greece Odyssey" lens is my baby, and I've turned off all ads except the default (wish it was text-only ads, but anyway). This means that somewhere out there, a lens at about Lensrank 2001 is getting top tier payouts for Infolinks and Chitka, second tier payouts from the Ad Pool.

If your primary goal is to make money on Squidoo, don't opt out of Infolinks. For me, content is primary, earnings secondary, so I hide ads when they detract too much from my content.

I notice that Chitka appears to have only two tiers. Apparently the sum total that Squidoo's taking in from Chitka isn't enough to have a third tier.

How do I know which tier is which? I just look at the numbers. There's Ad Pool payouts at $19.42, $3.30, and $.17. That must be the three tiers for the Ad Pool this month.

There's one more thing you can do here. Click on a lens name to view historical payouts for that particular lens.