Update December 5, 2010: Helium radically changed the payment system. Most importantly, "upfront" payments based on writing stars are gone. The only way to get upfront payments now is to go through the Marketplace system and to give up exclusive rights. That means writing stars have much less significance now. Their only value is that some of the Marketplace articles (it looks like a small minority of the articles, at this point) will be restricted to writers who have one or three writing stars. The rating star system remains the same. You still need at least one rating star to get revenue share income.
Original post below:
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Helium gives its members stars for both writing and rating. Before you dismiss this as a regression back to grade school days, you should know that how much you get paid at Helium, and whether you get paid at all, depends upon how many stars you have.
The Helium star system is complicated. It confuses all newcomers and many old-timers. In this, the first of a planned series of beginners' guides to Helium, I'll be giving a bird's eye view of how the system works. Later articles will go into the specifics of how to get and keep writing and rating stars. After that, some advanced strategies for earning stars in the most efficient way possible. (Update 12/5/10: Nope, never did get around to writing the rest of the "series." This is it.)
Why is the Helium star system so complicated?
The Helium star system is like the U.S. Tax Code. When Congresscritters want to get people to do things or to stop doing things, they fiddle around with the tax code. They lower taxes for behaviors they want to encourage, and raise them for those that they don't. Every time they do that, they have to add a new rule, and every year more rules are stuffed into the Tax Code, which was already bulging at the seams. It's become a huge unwieldy mess that no one, not even the experts, can completely understand.
On a smaller scale, Helium does the same thing. The Helium powers that be want to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others, so they use the star system to dole out rewards and punishments in order to shape members' behavior. Whenever Helium thinks of new things it wants us to do or to stop doing, it adds new rules to the already complicated star system.
What does Helium want us to do?
Helium wants us to do four basic things: (1) Rate often enough to keep the rating engine afloat. (2) Do it without cheating. (3) Write a lot of articles. (4) Make those articles good, or at least popular.
Why does Helium care how often we rate?
Helium sees its rating system as being the heart and soul of the site, what distinguishes the site from its competition. The very name "Helium" is a reference to the rating system, because on Helium, according to an early advertising slogan, quality rises -- like helium balloons.
The system won't work, though, unless people do a LOT of rating. Some people like to rate, others hate it. Left to their own devices, the members as a group won't do enough rating to keep the rating engine going.
Why does the system need so many rates?
The Helium rating system gives the rater two articles to compare. The rater chooses which one is better and casts a vote. Since so many articles need to be compared to so many other articles, the system has an almost insatiable appetite for more votes.
Does it really work?
Yes and no. This question is often debated on the Helium boards. In my opinion, rating
is correlated with quality, but only weakly.
Rating creates a sort order for articles. On Helium, unlike many other content sites, several people write to the same title. Articles that are rated higher rise to the top of the pack for that title. That's the "helium rising" part.
On paper, the Helium rating system sounds like a brilliant idea. Content sites have always had a problem with people trying to "game" the system. If a site rewards people for the popularity of their articles, based on a simple "rate my article" system, then there will always be people who will organize themselves into groups, known derisively as "click circles," to rate each other up. The result is that a lot of crap gets rated highly.
Helium's innovative idea was that instead of raters choosing which articles to rate, they would be given articles in a semi-random way. The authors' names would be stripped off, so that the raters wouldn't know who wrote the articles they were evaluating. That, combined with the idea of comparing two articles, rather than just voting for one at a time, sounded as if it was a great solution to the problems of "click circles" as well as to any problems of grade inflation.
One problem is that it's still possible to game the system. It's much harder to do than in a simple "rate this article" system, but it's not impossible. A second problem is that raters who are themselves bad writers may not be able to recognize good writing. A third problem is that because rating has become required to receive certain payments some, perhaps many, raters just want to get through it as quickly as possible.
The result? Despite Helium's innovative rating engine, the top slots of titles are sometimes filled with very bad articles.
Why can't I just get my rating over with quickly by voting for articles at random?
Helium uses an algorithm to keep track of the way you rate, and it penalizes people who rate inconsistently.
You mean the system is looking over my shoulder and judging me on how I judge articles?
Yeah. It's disconcerting.
I'm confused. How do I actually get rating stars?
That's complicated, and this post has already grown to monster proportions. I'll be covering that in a later post.
Didn't you mention writing stars earlier?
To make things even more confusing (ha), Helium has two separate star systems, one for rating stars, the other for writing stars. Each works differently.
My head hurts.
That's not a question. Writing stars are based on a combination of how many articles you have written and how highly they are rated.
What do you mean by "a combination"?
Well, that gets a little complicated too. For now, the most important thing to know is that both quantity and quality (or, more accurately, how highly your articles have been rated) count when it comes to your writing stars.
So how does this all affect my money?
Helium pays for articles in two ways. One is by revenue share, where you get a certain percentage of the income that Helium gets for the ads on your articles. The other is by "upfronts," where you get a small flat fee for publishing certain kinds of articles.
Rating stars affect whether or not you receive revenue share. Writing stars affect whether or not you receive upfronts, and if so, how much they will be.
Clip art of stars licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com
