Empire Avenue CEO, (e)Dups, announced on the EAv blog and General Discussion Community that EAv will be making changes to the way it calculates share prices and dividends as early as June 4
The announcement is very detailed, so I encourage you to read the whole thing, but the highlights include:
- Blogs connected via RSS will no longer have any impact on dividends (this does not apply to WordPress.com blogs using the WordPress network connection in EAv)
- The social media activity EAv looks at to calculate dividends and share price will change from a “rolling window” to a fixed period from 01:00 UTC the previous day to 00:59 UTC.
- The formulas for calculating dividend and earnings will be tweaked to reward users for engagement and good reputation.
Impact?
I asked Dups what he thought the net effect would be on share prices and dividends. While initially he said they did not know, after some follow-up it sounds like while they don’t know exactly what the impact will be, they expect it to be relatively minor.
Of course, if you’ve been on EAv for any length of time, you know there are some people who will howl about any change that has even the smallest negative impact on share prices or dividends, so I expect there will be some complaining when these changes are implemented.
I’m taking a wait and see attitude towards this. The changes are being made for good reasons. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that there won’t be any unintended consequences.
Kill Earnings?
The one question I have is, why not just kill earnings? My earnings are less than 400e a day. They’re meaningless. It’s not worth the code, processing time, space on the website or support.
Empire Avenue Tips 
May 31, 2013 @ 16:07:19
It would be nice, I guess, if these changes would decrease the stock value of users never using EAv any more (like (e)PIRILLO). On the other hand, this would mean I need to sell a lot of shares quickly.
May 31, 2013 @ 16:20:42
The big unknown in all of this is whether the changes will be significant enough to cause mass buying or selling. I seriously doubt it because hundreds of the most hard core EAv users have portfolios > 5,000 stocks. The only reason for those users to sell would be if changes in the dividend calculation dropped a lot of stocks significantly out of the top 5k.
May 31, 2013 @ 23:07:55
I always wondered if your stocks are effected by activity in areas like Facebook groups and why I can’t add a Facebook group to EA?
Jun 01, 2013 @ 09:18:24
EAv is limited by the data each platform provides to developers in its API. I don’t think FB makes FB group data available. Google+ only provides data on posts that are public. LinkedIn provides almost no data. Not much EAv can do in those situations.
Jun 01, 2013 @ 08:02:02
I’m with you on killing the earnings ~ nice to know I’m not the only one experiencing the wildly fluctuating earnings that don’t make sense from one day to the next.
Paul, how do you find out if you’re in the top 5K? I didn’t know what it was until you commented on it above. I know in Avenue.io I can see the icon for 5K – how do I find out if I’m in the 5K or is there a way? Just curious .. thanks. Have a SUPERCOOL weekend .. roll’n 😉
Jun 01, 2013 @ 09:06:07
Hey Dave, the cutoff for the top 5k is a dividend around 0.32e/share. It fluctuates day to day but you’re definitely in the top 5k every day.
I use https://dr-dittrich.de/eav/eav.pl If you click the buy button, you can do a search, click the checkbox next to “only top 5k dividend paying stocks”, sort by dividend and click the “run query” button.
Jun 02, 2013 @ 15:49:34
I’m with killing the earnings. It takes all night and sometimes part of the day to calculate such a small amount of “cash”. K.I.S.S.