A new twist on social media: Getting paid to post

Nicole Johnson and Carrie Finklea are two actresses trying to make it in Hollywood.

To their online fans, they are best known as "The Besties" -- ditzy, fictional personas they play in comedic videos they post online nearly every week. They used to only upload their clips on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, but now they also use Bubblews -- a free social media site that pays people for their posts.

Users can attach video, pictures, and blogs to their pages and earn a penny for every like, view, and comment. Posts are required to be at least 400 characters. Johnson and Finklea say their 10 posts have earned them nearly $100.

"We put a lot of time and effort into these videos and a lot of time and effort into blogging about these videos," Johnson told CBS News correspondent Bigad Shaban. "It's nice to actually get a little compensation for the work that we do."

"So you get paid for the same kinds of things you used to post for free?" Shaban asked.

"Absolutely," Johnson replied. "Tit for tat. They profit, so do we."

Bubblews employs a staff of just 13 people inside a small but trendy office in San Francisco. The website boasts about 1.2 million views per day from more than 220 countries. 26-year-old Arvind Dixit, a biology major and former toxicologist for the FDA, says he founded Bubblews after watching Facebook make billions off a website where users supply the content for free.

Facebook earned $5.41 billion during the first half of this year alone, according to the company's financial statements.

"Where is that worth coming from? It's coming from people," Dixit said. "It's coming from [users'] thoughts...it's coming from their comments. So it's a lot of this information that people are giving away for free that we wanted to kind of put a stop to that, and make more business sense out of it, and make it more of a fair ecosystem for everybody, rather than just have a network that's built up on, you know, basically the ideas of other people."

Bubblews makes money off advertising posted on its website. While the company won't say how much it's paid out to its more than 300,000 users, Dixit tells CBS News some Bubblews members have made as much as $10,000 since the beta version of the site launched in September 2012.

The company's main competitor, Bonzo Me, offers a similar service and promises to give 80 percent of its advertising dollars to its members. Bubblews pays its users in $50 increments, so depending on how viral a post becomes, it could be a while before users receive their first check.

For Johnson and Finklea, it's not just about the money.

"It's a matter of respect, too," Finklea said. "When we feel respected, we also respect the work. When people are putting out content, where there is actual time, thought, and there's a message, yeah, you should be paid for that."