As announced in the Empire Avenue blog, dividends will no longer be based on investment earnings. Dividends will be paid based only on activity and network scores. The exact date of this implementation has not been given, other than it will be before December 17. On the bright side, dividends will not drop when the shares available are increased. However, this completely decouples the stock’s portfolio from dividends.

Because the top five network scores are taken into account and few people have high network scores on more than two networks, whether or not someone is active on Empire Avenue will have little impact on their dividends.  There’s already a high incidence of ghost accounts, that aren’t actively trading. These will be worth reviewing for dividends. “Dividends are there to encourge (sic) you to buy in people who produce good content in valuable networks.” Unfortunately, this change doesn’t encourage people to be active Empire Avenue participants if they are active in other social media. Expect businesses to continue join Empire Avenue as advertising and abandon their accounts and the proportion of personal ghost accounts to increase.

Another recent change that impacted dividend investing is the immediate impact of network scores on share price. New players who connect their accounts no longer have to wait for their share price to increase dramatically based on trading.  The quickest way to generate cash is investing in new players because many of their share prices rise dramatically from the 10s to the 50s in a couple of weeks based on their network scores, outweighing dividend investing in the short term, and there is little risk to investing in brand new players who hook up at least one network because almost everyone’s stock price rises more than 10%, which is the cost of buying selling shares. Sell stocks when their share price levels off and dividends per share are below .40.