We have taken great care to implement a world-class model for income distribution amongst our users. Answering questions is fun, but if you don’t really care if you get paid or not, Quora or Reddit may be a better fit for you.
At Sage, our main priority is building a community of experts – ‘Sages’ – where the success of the Sages leads to the success of the site and vice versa. We believe Sages are the critical element to building a game-changing platform, and we will treat you as such. We also believe that if we have the best experts, then we will be the first place people seek advice for their most important questions.
Sages have the ability to earn money three different ways:
- Answering paid private questions
- Recruiting other Sages and earning a portion of the answer fees when they answer questions
- Answering public questions
Breaking Down Earnings Potential
Answering Paid Private Questions (70% of Answer Fees)
During Sage registration, you pick your topics, sub-topics, and tags and then select your answer fee. This is the baseline from where all calculations below are made. Each Sage will make 70% of their ‘Answer Fee’ in paid private question income.
Building your Referral Tree (Up to 10.5% out of 12% Shared Pool from Answer Fees)
Sages also have the ability to build a referral tree. This operates just like any other multi-level marketing system in the sense that for each person you refer, and each of their own referrals (up to three levels down), you earn passive income each time they answer a question. This money does not come out of your 70% answer fee above. To be absolutely clear, this will not impact your current or future earnings potential negatively! Sage sets aside a percentage of revenue from all “answers” to pay out to each Sage’s referral tree. This revenue comes from a shared pool of dollars and does not negatively impact either the referrer’s earnings or the referee’s earnings. By helping your referrer build their tree, you increase their earnings potential on our platform. Subsequently, by building your own tree, you also increase your own earnings potential for the same reasons.
The amount earned depends on how deep into your tree you are. For example:
- 1st Level referrals earn you 6% of their answer fee for each question – If your referral charges $100, you’ll earn $6 for each question they answer
- 2nd Level referrals earn 3% of the referee’s answer fee
- 3rd Level referrals earn 1.5% of the referee’s answer fee
Providing Answers to our Public Forum Questions (Remainder of 12% Shared Pool)
Sages also earn money proportionally by answering public forum questions. Sages will already be incentivized to answer questions in the public forums to build their reputation scores and show proof of knowledge. This ability to provide great answers to public questions will highlight the capabilities of each individual Sage.
Not only does that obvious use case exist for answering public questions, but we have taken the additional step to incentivize the Sage by paying them from the Shared Pool remaining funds. This dollar amount will be distributed proportionally at the end of each 7-day period (and moving to 1 day after full launch) based on the answer acceptance rates of the Sage responses, the number of questions answered, and upvoted by each Sage, and other key metrics like average response time.