A Better Payment for Multiple Teachers

[rckmnx]

See this is something bothering me for a while, and I don't have all the knowledge with hooks and best practices, but I will try to explain it on a developer's way. The payment as we have now is just a percentage for a single product. This does not quite work if I provide subscriptions. <h2>Basic Subscription</h2> Let's say I pay 10% of the "subscription product" for each Teacher:

• At the 11th author, I would have to pay 110%, or
• Rearrange all Teacher percentages every time I add a new Teacher
• It wouldn't be fair: I would either have to provide manual data for deciding wich teacher deserves a higher or lower percentage, which could lead me to prosecution.
• It wouldn't be manageable: Adding a teacher in the middle of a month wouldn't be the same as adding it in the end of it; since I would pay based on my monthly subscriber income.
• It cannot be a fixed value: A teacher that led me to get many more subscribers wouldn't be as valuable for me as other that gets me close to none.

  We are not looking for a website with multiple areas (products) of subscription, where somebody could pay to access some courses but not all of them. We are looking for an open possibility where all the content is there for you. You pay 19.99/month and that's it. On a marketing perspective, it increases the value at no real additional cost, so it's a win/win.   <h2>A Better Subscription System</h2> On the best-case-scenario I could find, every Teacher should be paid based on what they contribute month-to-month to the website. Equal pay wouldn't be fair to the teacher that has more courses. We could think that more courses = more income, but that wouldn't be fair to teachers who have better courses and more interested visitors, would it? After all, my monthly subscription comes from visitors that are interested in what they are seeing on the website, not on what we have and doesn't matter for the user.   So let's just imagine this: Let's say my website receives $20.000/month from subscribers, and I want 50% of all my revenue to be divided for teachers. All website classes received 10.000 views past month. Every teacher has 1 course with 10 classes each.

• Teacher A: 1.000 views
• Teacher B: 1.500 views
• Teacher C: 2.500 views
• Teacher D: 5.000 views

So this month every teacher received $1/view on their classes, cool right? Well there is the slight possibility that we have a new scenario like this: <h2>Month 2</h2> New teacher "Mr. SmartAss" joined the community, and it was awesome! My website this month has the same revenue of the last month: $20.000. I still pay 50% to all my teachers, but this month I got many, many more views: 10.000.000 views!

• Teacher A: 1.000 views
• Teacher B: 1.500 views
• Teacher C: 2.500 views
• Teacher D: 5.000 views
• Mr. SmartAss: 9.990.000 views

So what happens here is worth $0.001.   Mr. SmartAss used a bot to refresh his classes and received multiple views from himself. So is it impossible to implement? You actually could only count one visit after a certain amount of time, and revisit would only count every 24hours or whatever works for each case.   I bet something like this would work   /* ------- *   Define values *  ------- */ $subscriberAmmountPaidToTeachers = get.wplms.teacher.field.value (0.50 for 50%) $montlyPayment = WooCommerce.product.month.valor * <span style="line-height: 1.5;">$subscriberAmmountPaidToTeachers</span> /* ------- *   Views *  ------- */ for ($timeOnPage = 0; $timeOnPage <= $defaultMinimumTime; $timeOnPage++) { sleep(1); <span style="line-height: 1.5;">       if ($timeOnPage == $defaultMinimumTime) { $viewCount++; $the_author_meta('seen') ++; $("seen_ + get_the_ID()") == true;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5;"> } </span>} wp_schedule_event(time(), 'daily', 'reset_seen_status', $args); $totalViews = get_post_type("classess").views /* ------- *   Payment *  ------- */ $payPerView = <span style="line-height: 1.5;">$montlyPayment / </span><span style="line-height: 1.5;">$totalViews;</span> loop: { $teacherPayment = get_teacher_views * <span style="line-height: 1.5;">$payPerView }</span>    

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I believe it would be something like this with the right code and hooks (of course :P), and you could even create a page for PayPal payments for each teacher account since you already implemented PayPal ID on the teacher's profile.     With this code, "Mr. SmartAss" might get some views, but not enough to hurt my business, and also it will be dynamically easy to increase/decrease anything in the website. Is this something you are capable of doing? I'd gladly help with ideas / research      

[MrVibe]

I have to agree that at this point the commissions section needs a complete revamp, so as to incorporate complex commission calculation methods as described above. "Views" calculation is a very tricky thing, even the advanced analytics platforms falter in calculating exact views, besides it is not at all recommended to track views in database which can possible add a lot of load on the system. Instead of views, it would be better to use a referral system which is independent of instructor commissions. For referrals you can try the affiliatewp plugin as well.

[deadelfujiama]

i think that the best solution to pay instructor when we using membership site is adopt a commission system similar to skillshare. if thiz month i earn 1000$ for subrsciption a part of this subscription will be divived equal for all instructor who in this months had a new students in their course. Other things is apply a different type of commission, for example we give 50% of commission to our instructor but we want to give this commission: - 25% when student who purchase a course click on "start course" - other 25% when same student click on "finish course" we are moving to do this customization for us, i like to know if something this is planned or what kind of revamp are planned about commission to avoid conflict with wplms developing

[rckmnx]

If anybody is interested, the best solution I found is http://postpaycounter.com/post-pay-counter-pro/   I am working towards paying for time/media plays as well as #visits/posts/etc., and getting rid of people with bad attitude. I hope to see WPLMS integrate a better feature in the future, I know you guys can. Maybe something to think about in 2016 :) Thanks everyone

[mjlinane]

Hey Rckmnx How did this work out for you? Were you able to accurately see the page views and calculate payments?

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