Writing for pennies

January 2012 content-site income

2012-02-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

I hit a plateau this month

January income:

more after the jump:

My content-site income has been fairly steady for the last few months, and I feel like I've hit a plateau. Most of the income again came from WriterAccess and CloudCrowd, with my Demand Studios income share coming in third.

There was little change from last month, but ...

it was well above the average, and ...

more than four times what I made this month last year:

Notes:

WriterAccess: I've been added to more "love lists" and got a new direct client.

Cloud Crowd: Things are about the same.

Textbroker: I only wrote a few articles this month, but there's a chance I may be promoted to Level 5. If so, I will probably write more.

I didn't write any new articles this month for Demand Studios, Helium, or Yahoo Voices (AC), but received the following in income share:

Demand Studios: Received $41.88 in income share for four articles. Although this is off the peak of $63.32 a few months ago, it is higher than last month's income share, so what I thought was the start of a downward slide has been reversed. Whew. Average income share per article for the month: $10.47.

Helium: Received $7.87 in revenue share for 266 articles. I also received $5 for a stock-content purchase. Helium has a cash-out minimum of $25, and this month was the first time I was able to cash out since October. Average revenue share per article for the month: $0.03.

Yahoo Voices (formerly Associated Content): I received $2.00 in revenue share for 153 articles. Yikes. Average revenue share per article for the month: $0.01.

Setting the bar so low it's scraping the ground

2012-01-14T12:18:00.000-08:00

"Many of our articles
are boring"

I came across an ad today on Problogger, looking for writers. I checked out the site ("The Hoth"), and came across something hilarious (or a depressing sign of the times, depending on your mood) in the FAQs:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't like these articles. What gives?

Most issues with articles have to do with stylistic differences and usually arise from confused expectations.

We do not make any excuses for our spun articles. They are:

> Not advertorial (meaning they don't promote your company or your product)

> Not intended to supplement your PR or Social Media efforts

> Probably boring

> Possibly cliche

> 80% written in the Philippines

And they are certainly not intended to win any Pulitzers

Why?

Because our articles are intended for search engines, only.

Since search engines are robots and can't actually differentiate between a "high quality" article and a "low quality" one,

Our Content Standards

1. Unique content
2. Semantically relevant (on topic and contains words related to your niche)
3. Readable (not necessarily worth reading)
4. Optimized with relevant images

For more information, please watch this video about our content standards.

If you feel we haven't lived up to our content standard after all, please contact us as we take content issues very seriously.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've got to give them points for honesty. Their stuff is crap, and they're not ashamed to admit it.

The company also has a blog where they post samples of their work, which is, indeed, just as bad as they say it is -- actually, worse -- and this:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 Things You Should Know About These Articles

* All of these articles are spun
* Many of them are boring
* The advice in them is probably no good
* Some grammar may be goofy.
* They will be counted by Google and give you quality, contextually relevant links!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've never seen a site be so brazen about the crappiness of its articles, and in a way, the honesty is refreshing. I do wonder, though, how many other content sites, while they would never admit it, only care about being "counted" by Google and don't mind at all if their articles are boring and unhelpful, as long as Google can't tell the difference. That would certainly go a long way towards explaining the low prices that many of the sites pay and the lack of respect some seem to have for their writers.

More about writing for Interact Media

2012-01-13T19:16:00.000-08:00

Interact Media, also known as the Zerys Content Marketplace, is a content broker, similar to Textbroker. Last month, I saw their ad on Craigslist, but didn't know anything else about them.

Today, I saw a discussion on the Demand Studios forums and learned that when you apply to Interact, you have to submit a 500-word sample that Interact keeps and publishes -- without paying for it. That sounds very uncool.

Aside from having to provide a freebie, which, of course, no one liked doing, opinions on the forum were mixed. Some people thought there wasn't much work at Interact, and what there was, paid too little. Others were finding more work and thought it was worth it on a dollar-per-hour basis because the assignments were easy, and they could do them quickly.

One person said that most of the gigs paid less than a penny/word (ouch), topping out occasionally at 3 cents/word. Several people said they made more by getting on clients' "favorite" lists and getting direct orders.

For me, having to give a freebie to get in the door is probably a dealbreaker.

Yahoo gets a new CEO

2012-01-04T07:44:00.000-08:00

Scott Thompson, new
CEO of Yahoo

Yahoo announced today that Scott Thompson, who was President of PayPal, is the new CEO of Yahoo. The last Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz, was fired in September, 2011.

Thompson has a good reputation -- he's said to have done wonders with PayPal.

Talks are also going on to sell a minority interest in Yahoo to outside investors, maybe to Google or Microsoft. Or Yahoo might be sold outright to another company.

It's hard to say how any of this will affect Yahoo Voices (aka Yahoo Contributor Network, aka Associated Content), except that we should continue to expect the unexpected. Constant change is the new normal.

Editing to add 1/7/12: The LA Times is saying that Thompson's pay package may be worth $27 million. That's a lot of pennies!

December 2011 content-site income

2011-12-31T12:05:00.000-08:00

A partridge in a pear tree

December income:

more after the jump:

I made more than last month, more than average, and more than this month a year ago, with most of the income coming from WriterAccess and CloudCrowd.

Change from last month:

Change from average:

Change from last year:

Notes:

WriterAccess: Smooth sailing. All content sites should be run like this.

CloudCrowd: I'm doing editing and reviewing. They've tweaked the system to make it easier to appeal rejections and to resubmit rejected work, which takes a good deal of the pressure off. (affiliate link)

Demand Studios: For the second month in a row, I didn't write anything new. I made $34.16 for revenue share for my four rev-share articles. This is down from $55.32 last month, and down from a peak of $63.32 the month before.

Helium: It was an eventful month at this wacky site. First, Helium's long-hyped system for rewarding experts was completely dead on arrival and had to be thrown away. Then, I was banned from the Helium boards for -- and I quote, from my banning mail -- the "12 days of Christmas." Happy holidays to you, too, Helium. [rolling eyes].

Is it even worth mentioning the money? I didn't make enough to cash out, and my revenue share for 266 articles was $8.16 (3 cents per article).

Yahoo Voices (aka Yahoo Contributor Network, formerly Associated Content): I didn't write anything new and made only $3.07 in revenue share for my 155 articles. That comes out to 2 cents per article, which is even less than what I made at Helium. Unlike Helium, though, AC does pay upfronts of $15 to $20 for the "metro beat" articles I write there occasionally. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the dust to settle down from their move to a new domain.

Constant Content: Nothing this month.

Textbroker: I got promoted to Level 4, but I'm still not feeling very enthusiastic and only did a little bit of work there.

Blogging: December is usually my best month for blogging income. I didn't receive the payments yet, but it was my highest-earning month ever for AdSense (Google ads), my second-highest month for Amazon affiliate sales (assuming nothing gets returned), and my fourth-highest month for bobblehead affiliate sales. Amazon pays a few months after earnings, so I should be paid for this month around February or March. As for AdSense, I'm just hoping I make it to their high cash-out minimum ($100) in this lifetime. Actually, at the rate I'm going (knock on wood), I may get there in a few months -- and it will be my first AdSense payment ever. Most of my blogging income (from all sources) was from my TV fan blogs, with the newest one doing the best.

Skyword gets $6 million investment

2011-12-19T17:45:00.000-08:00

I just heard that Skyword, a company that produces content for brand-name companies, including Pampers, Bounty (paper towels), and Gather, announced today that Cox Media Group had invested 6 million dollars to "expand the Skyword platform to address new markets, and grow Skyword’s sales, marketing and client services functions." (That's from the company's press release.)

My take is this: The content site industry has two types of sites: (1) ad-supported open-platform sites, where companies create structured spaces where anyone can write articles about anything, and (2) broker sites, where companies bring together publishers and pre-screened writers and make money by taking a percentage of the writers' fees.

The open platforms are in trouble. Google has been blasting at them for almost a year. Many have already shut down, and the others are struggling. The open-platform revenue-share model, in my opinion, is fading away.

Open-platform sites that encourage creativity and authenticity, and that set the bar high, with a genuine commitment to excellence, might be able to thrive, but most of the sites I've seen do the opposite -- setting "good enough" as the standard and applying assembly-line techniques to writing, turning articles into manufactured, predictable products -- inexpensive, but not really satisfying to a web-surfing public that can turn elsewhere at the click of a mouse.

The broker sites, though, seem to be doing well. I haven't heard of any going out of business recently. New broker sites are popping up, and some old ones are expanding. Textbroker, for example, recently opened a site for UK writers, adding that to its existing U.S., German, and French sites. And now, today, we hear that Skyword, another broker site, is going to expand.

I think for writers who want to work for content sites, the broker sites now provide the best opportunities.

Liking the Yahoo Voices guidelines

2011-12-04T00:13:00.000-08:00

"Voice drawing" by Ze Frank

I finally got around to reading the new guidelines for Yahoo Voices (formerly Associated Content), and I'm very pleased. (I would say that I was "thrilled" if the word didn't have such negative connotations now as the harbinger of bad news.)

It's smart thinking for the post-Panda era and good writing advice for any era:

"Be yourself: authentic and unique. It should always be clear that your content comes from YOU, and that no one else in the world could have created it. Find your voice. Submit content on topics that you’re passionate, knowledgeable, and insightful about. Use the first-person voice when appropriate, and make clear in your content how your personal experiences inform your statements and topic choices. Always offer unique insight that differentiates your content from other pieces on the Web."

It could be a chance to get back to my writing roots. For too long, I've been on a detour into what feels like the innards of a giant machine. When writing for Demand Studios, with its assembly-line procedures, and to a lesser extent, for Helium, with its secret algorithms peering over my shoulder, I felt that I was serving the machine and had to sand off any bumps of individuality that might cause the machine to belch.

I think that Yahoo gets it.

"Don’t rehash. You must provide a fresh and unique angle on every story. Do not reword or rehash information from other sources and call it your own. This rule applies even when you cite your sources; if you’re not creating a unique and original piece of content, don’t submit to us. Sources should inform your content, and not be cobbled together to form the majority of your content."

I've been cobbling stuff together for a long time now, but I felt, no matter how much I tried to suppress the thought, that I was wasting everyone's time, my own and the readers'. What's the point of dragging pieces of information from one part of the internet to another? If I could fnd them, my readers could too. There's not much "quality" there, to use the Google buzzword of the year.

It's a relief to read something from a content site that makes sense, where I don't feel I have to twist my brain into a pretzel to try to understand.

Suite101 kicked out of Google News - and admits to gaming the system

2011-12-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

Photo by BeeThalin

Many content sites have been kicked out of Google News, but usually they pretend to be shocked and/or they accuse Google of picking on them without cause. This is the first time, that I know of, that someone at one of the sites has admitted that they didn't really care about the news they were producing.

"We began indexing articles in Google News in April 2010 as a purely SEO-driven initiative: the goals at the time were less to give reporters a platform or audiences a publication as to nab greater search traffic. With an English-language market well equipped with serious news organizations, to even think about competing you really have to mean it. As a group, we never really did." -- Michael Kedda, Editor-in-chief, Suite 101, in a memo posted internally in Suite 101 for the site's authors

That's quite an admission. Full memo after the jump:

"We have received confirmation from Google that our news articles are no longer being included in the Google news index. While we don't know exactly why, and do know for some writers this is a shame, we're taking it in stride. Slightly bad timing if anything.

"We began indexing articles in Google News in April 2010 as a purely SEO-driven initiative: the goals at the time were less to give reporters a platform or audiences a publication as to nab greater search traffic. With an English-language market well equipped with serious news organizations, to even think about competing you really have to mean it. As a group, we never really did.

"Looking forward, we know that news journalism, as a form we respect, does not factor into our plans for future—at least not as something we produce ourselves. It's an easy, calm decision, unfortunately just slightly tainted by the apparent snub.

"Just as well. Time to focus.

"You will note that the submission guidelines have been amended to remove the section on news. We will also be removing the "newsworthy" check box from the article draft page.

"You are still welcome to publish articles on timely events, however we will not designate those articles as "news" in the articles' URLs.

Thanks,
Michael"

(via the AC, um Yahoo Voice, forums)

Cheerleading for $2.50 articles

2011-12-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

Virtual-reality cheerleaders (photo by yukali)

I mentioned earlier that I find it difficult to keep a cool head when dealing with Helium’s marketing messages. The problem cropped up again today when I read some new posts in the Helium forums.

By the way, I’m not revealing any secrets here. The Helium forums are open to be read by the public, and the forums are always two clicks away from every public Helium page.

Still, in this post, I’m going to leave off the names of the people involved, to make this more about what was written and less about the personalities involved. (In the same vein, I’d appreciate if people didn’t leave the kind of “So-and-so is a stinky poopyhead” comments that posts about Helium sometimes elicit. I’m trying to take the high road here. Thoughtful and/or funny complaints, criticisms, rants and other forms of “negativity” are more than welcome, but I'd like to avoid 3^rd-grade-schoolyard or YouTube-comment-section territory.)

More after the jump:

This is the post that kicked everything off, from a Helium staffer (forum posts are in blue, my comments in black):

Happy Holidays Promotion

It's certainly been an interesting and challenging year for writers, and for Helium. It's the holiday season, and we all look forward to celebrating.

In that spirit, we're announcing our Happy Holidays Promotion. Beginning Monday, December 5 at noon Eastern Time, and each weekday until Christmas, we're going to be offering a large number of paid titles to the community. In order to make it fair, we are limiting the number of titles a writer can claim to one per day. There will be $2.50 titles until the 25th!

Think of this as our daily gift to our writing community! Happy Holidays!

The only good thing I can say about this post is that at least the staffer didn’t use the words “thrilling” or “excited.” Seriously, $2.50 for an article is not a good price. That goes without saying, right? Or at least, it should.

I think Helium is constantly testing the waters to see how low it can go with payment and still get away with it. Not only are “regular” prices always drifting down, but every special promotion seems to pay less than the previous one.

Last year, Helium sprinkled some $10 and $15 titles into the list. About two weeks ago, they had a promotion where they dropped a few titles paying $5. A few days after that, they had a promotion with titles that paid $3.00. Now they have a promotion paying $2.50. I understand why they would want to test the market – there’s nothing inherently wrong with that -- but calling this a “gift” seems like a gratuitous dig. I wonder if they had a good laugh at the writers’ expense over at Helium HQ.

There were a few grumpy reactions to the post, but not as many as you might expect. I think that’s because most of the people who are interested in making money with their writing have long since left Helium, or at least have been chased off the forums. But even a small hint of “negativity” sends the site’s cheerleaders into a tailspin.

[I just went back to the thread to copy the posts I was thinking of – and I saw that since the last time I looked, most of the “negative” responses were deleted. The "positive" responses were all still there, though, and those are the ones I wanted to write about here anyway.]

Sub-Channel Manager #1 wrote: I'd rather have 1 article at $2.50 than 0 articles at $5.00.

This is the kind of Helium “logic” that drives me nuts. It’s setting up an arbitrary choice – one article for $2.50 or no articles at $5.00 – and then draws a conclusion from that. But that is hardly the entire universe of choices for writers. How about one article at $16.00? You can get that on other content sites. Or, for that matter, how about one article at $450, which is what a professional writer might get for a 450-word article? Or how about anything else that exists in the vast range in-between the extremes?

To be fair, S-C M #1 did say s/he would probably not be writing articles for the promotion.

Then they brought out the heavy guns. Board Moderator #1 wrote:

Folks, this brings to mind something I've seen repeatedly. Helium runs a promotion. Some people complain and don't take advantage of it. They don't earn anything from it, and often complain even more.

The second group of people take advantage of the promotion and thus earn more than they would have. They don't complain as much, because they still make more than they would have without the promotion.

The point is that the writers here can take advantage of the promotion, or they can decide not to. It is entirely up to them. However, it isn't difficult to figure out which ones are likely to increase their earnings.

More of the kind of “logic” – this time spiked with guilt-tripping – that drives me nuts. Board Moderator #1 smugly congratulates him/herself for being smart enough to take advantage of the promotion and to earn more than the despised complainers. The goal of this post, it appears, is to shame the complainers into realizing the errors of their ways and trigger their desire to emulate the successful people who come out ahead by taking advantage of the opportunities they are offered.

But just like Sub-Channel Manager #1, Board Moderator #1 is setting up a false choice. It’s not a question of writing an article for $2.50 or not writing at all. There are plenty of other choices.

While the people in BM #1’s hypothetical first group earn nothing, and the people in BM’s hypothetical second group earn $2.50, there are a millions of writers who are not in either group, and who are making far more.

This kind of false-choice reasoning is common enough, alas, that it has earned a spot in the standard collections of logical fallacies, where it is called a false dilemma, the either-or fallacy, or black-and-white thinking. A common example: “You are either with us or against us.”

Another logical error here is that BM #1 ignores opportunity costs. Writing an article – whether for no pay, for $2.50, or for 100 times that amount – takes time and mental energy. Time and mental energy are both limited resources -- you only have a finite amount of them available in any given day. The time and energy you spend to write an article that pays $2.50 are time and energy that are no longer available to use to write an article somewhere else that might pay more than $2.50

A few posts in the thread later, Board Moderator #1 continues:

I suppose it all depends on a person's viewpoint. I tend to be optimistic. I see an opportunity to make $50, in addition to what I'd make anyway, as something to be enthusiastic about. Naturally, it requires that the articles are written, but personally, I'd probably be writing anyway, so it is a bonus for what I would normally do.

Believe me, I do understand that there are a lot of people out there who have a much more pessimistic viewpoint. I respect that. It is hard not to be pessimistic at times with the sad state of our economy. Certainly, if people choose to feel that way, I shan't blame them. I simply choose not to.

The main logic problem here is in the phrase, “Naturally, it requires that the articles are written.” Using the passive voice, BM #1 seems to suggest that the articles almost write themselves. But, again, it takes time and energy to write those articles. To earn the $50 that BM #1 mentions, BM #1 would need to write 20 articles. That’s a lot of articles. For many people, writing 20 articles would take considerable time and thought, which could have been used to earn far more than $50.

BM #1 also says that s/he probably would have been writing articles (presumably of the same level of difficulty), even if s/he weren’t being paid anything at all. This seems to be assuming that Helium exists in a closed universe, where there is nowhere to write outside of its virtual walls.

There also seems to be a bit of magical thinking at the end – “I simply choose not to.” Optimism can be a very good thing, but is there a point where it can go too far and become too rigid and, therefore, counterproductive?

Board Moderator #2 wrote:

I would hope all those who feel "cheated" once again by this "paltry" gift offered by Helium will refrain from participating and leave the $2.50 titles for those who might appreciate a positive gesture in response to all our complaints over recent months.

We complained titles were grabbed before we had a chance. Helium is limiting this promo to one title per day in the spirit of fairness.

We complained the majority of titles were RS, $1 or $2. Helium is offering $2.50 titles. (Reminiscent of the up-fronts in the past)

You have to compete with others for the prize? Aw . . . are you that unsure of your writing prowess? Would it be better for Helium to just hand $2.50 to anyone who blogs out 400 words and then listen to complaints about having to rate inferior gobbledygook?

Sorry for feeling compelled to point this out - but some comments are just plain rude.

Here we’ve got sarcasm and hostility directed at the despised complainers. It almost feels like a war, with the positive people trying to destroy, convert, or at least drive off the negative complainers. This is something that’s not confined to the Helium boards by any means, and I don’t think I really understand the anger – other than that we have two very different worldviews that are clashing. I think the positive people generally feel more threatened by the negative people than vice-versa – though the fact that I’m sitting here writing so much about this, trying to figure it out, shows that I’m disturbed by it too.

The main logical fallacy is here: “You have to compete with others for the prize? Aw . . . are you that unsure of your writing prowess?” Every other content site that I am aware of, along with every other kind of publication, pays for assignments as long as the assignments are good enough to be accepted. The notion that several writers have to write to each title – and that ALL of them agree in advance to give up rights in their articles to Helium, even though only one will get paid – is unique to Helium.

This is NOT like writing on spec or submitting to a slush pile (a frequent cheerleader analogy) because if you write on spec you KEEP all rights to your work until someone accepts it. Here, Helium takes the work whether or not you are the person they choose to pay.

Board Moderator #2’s mocking sarcasm on this point is inappropriate, because what Helium is doing here is well outside the norm, and skepticism would be the normal reaction.

Board Moderator # 1 returns:

… let me say that Helium isn't going to give away money and go broke because of it. Helium wants to stay around for a long time. The way to do that is to make money and attempt to create opportunities for the writers to make money. That is what it is striving to do and has been doing.

Since this is prior to the promotion, everyone please answer this very unofficial poll: Do you want Helium to cancel the Holiday promotion, or not? Only 2 answers accepted..."yes, cancel it", "no, don't cancel it".

I might be more sympathetic to this depiction of Helium as an impoverished company that couldn’t possibly afford to pay more than $2.50/article if the company hadn’t been bought out for 70 million dollars.

As for the second paragraph – this is great – BM #1 is now proposing a poll that is based on our old friend, the false-choice logical fallacy! I couldn’t have thought of a better textbook example if I tried.

(Only one person took the bait, and that person voted to cancel the promotion, so it looks as if the poll did not have its desired effect.)

So what can I conclude from all this? (1) It’s sad that some writers try so hard to convince other writers to settle for rates and terms that are so much worse than the norm. (2) People who insist on positive thinking all the time, no matter what the situation, often seem insecure in their beliefs and will lash out at anyone whose viewpoints contradict their own. (3) This all pushes my buttons for reasons I still don’t fully understand.

Too long/didn’t read: If this article promotion were a good deal, it would speak for itself. Instead, Helium volunteers have to make increasingly far-fetched and emotionally manipulative arguments in its favor.

The Helium changes, one year later

2011-12-02T22:09:00.000-08:00

It's the one-year anniversary of the day Helium abruptly announced it was ditching its upfront-payment system and installing a far less attractive system in its place.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look back now at the original announcement and see how well it has stood the test of time, especially since there was so much strong, often vicious disagreement in the forums about the changes.

Given the benefit of hindsight, can we now see who was right? Was it the cheerleaders, who said the new system was an exciting opportunity for Helium's writers? Or was it the skeptics, who thought the system looked like a pay cut? Were the cheerleaders right to say the skeptics were living only for the moment and were too short-sighted to appreciate the long-term benefits? Or were the skeptics more clear-sighted and more grounded in reality, with a better ability to see where this was really headed?

More after the jump.

The original announcement is in blue, my comments in black. The announcement was written -- or at least posted -- by a staffer who (I think, but am not sure) is no longer at Helium, which adds an extra bit of irony.

Today we are announcing changes to Helium.com’s upfront payment program. Below you can find a detailed list of all of our changes and what they mean to you as a Helium writer:

Basic changes are as follows:
Effective Monday, Dec. 6, all titles eligible for upfront payments will be located in Helium’s Marketplace.

This didn't last long. They did away with the name "Marketplace." Articles that were for outside publishers (what "Marketplace" originally meant) were moved to an invitation-only area newly renamed "Content Source." What was called "Marketplace" in the Dec. 6 incarnation was renamed the "Assignment System." The majority of articles in the assignment system now are for revenue share only, and do not pay upfronts.

This is one example of how Helium changed the names of things, which is something that happened many times throughout this past year, always causing a lot of confusion. It's still going on now; a few days ago, Helium announced that the role now called "Senior Writer" was going to be renamed "Premium Writer," and a new role, with different qualifications and different rewards, would be called "Senior Writer."

I'm not sure if this confusion is deliberately sown to keep writers off-guard, or if it's just thoughtless, but the frequent name changes make it hard to keep up with, and discuss, what is happening on the site.

By having our upfront payments go through Marketplace we are accomplishing multiple objectives. First and foremost, this enables our writers to easily identify titles that will earn upfront payments. In many cases, payments will be higher than the previous program offered.

That turned out not to be true. The pay for Marketplace -- now "assignment system" -- titles has steadily dropped over the past year since this announcement was made. More than half the titles now pay nothing upfront. Almost all of the rest pay $1 or $2 (and writers have to compete for those amounts). Just today, Helium announced that as a holiday "gift," it would be dropping titles that paid $2.50 upfront.

When $2.50 payments for 400+ word articles on subjects someone else selected become "gifts," you know that you are very, very far from seeing payments that are "higher than" anything, except perhaps pay rates in extremely impoverished third-world countries. That comes out to $0.00625 per word -- a little more than one-half of a penny.

The new system will also allow us to concentrate earnings in areas we believe will be the most beneficial for our writers as well as build content in areas that will add the greatest value to our readers. Additionally, we will utilize the functionality of Marketplace to implement a more rigorous system of editing, resulting in higher quality articles and increasing the quality of Helium.

Read what's featured on the front page now, a year after this promise of higher-quality articles. In my opinion, the often awkward writing and the frequent factual errors in the front-page articles speak for themselves as far as Helium's article quality.

In the new payment system, one article will be selected to earn the upfront payment which will be the amount you see listed in Marketplace. The selected article will be determined by a combination of editor grading, member rating and staff input. Articles that are accepted will transition and earn slightly less than the selected article.

That's another promise that didn't last long. It was soon changed to only one person getting the upfront payment, and the others getting nothing.

Members who choose to take advantage of this opt-in program will agree to give Helium exclusive rights to the article.

They actually backed down on this one -- the only change, out of all the many changes they made after the announcement, that benefited, rather than hurt the writers. I think they may have realized there could be legal problems with demanding copyright transfers (which is what perpetual exclusive rights amounts to) without an actual signature.

This exclusivity helps to keep the SEO value here at Helium, benefiting the Helium Community. With the new system, we are no longer subsidizing competing sites and the value of Helium articles and members’ earnings will be ensured. Exclusivity is also valuable to publishers interested in purchasing stock content. These publishers are more inclined to purchase content from our members when they know it’s exclusive. If you would rather retain rights to your article, you can write to the same titles once they transition to Helium.

They later tried to convince people to willingly give up their copyrights by saying Helium was only doing it for our own good. In the end, though, as I mentioned above, Helium abandoned (had to abandon?) their plan to take perpetual exclusive rights. Instead, they said they would take exclusive rights for only one year (which gets around any copyright-transfer problems). But -- they said it would apply to ALL articles submitted on the site, not just those in the assignment system or those that paid upfronts. So the notion that we could choose to retain the same rights to our new articles as we had before Dec. 6, 2010, also went by the wayside.

The payment value for each title will differ, depending on a number of factors, such as complexity of topic, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) value and amount of research expected. The titles in Marketplace will have been researched and written to ensure high SEO value. These titles will be better earners, which is valuable to writers and the Helium Community.

I've heard from several title seeders who said they were told to get ideas from or copy titles from other sites, and who said they had no training in SEO and didn't know anything about writing SEO-optimized titles. So much for SEO research. It's also doubtful that the titles were generally better earners. People who wrote to the new, supposedly better-earning titles often reported making far less in revenue share than they had with the old titles. It's hard to know for sure though, without access to information the site has never released.

With the new system, the quality of content on the site will greatly improve.

I've seen no evidence of this. Again, I think the quality of the majority of the front-page articles -- which are presumably ones that have been selected as being among the best on the site -- speaks for itself.

It will encourage objective, knowledge-based articles written in the third person, rather than first person opinion pieces.

I think Helium is barking up the wrong tree here. I believe that the public wants its "knowledge" from people who have genuine expertise in the subject matter and prefers a chattier, friendlier, more personal tone from the just-us-folks writers at content sites. Reasonable people can disagree on this point, though.

Credits for new payment system:
When a title transitions to Helium.com, a credit for the article selected to receive the full upfront payment will be instantly awarded to the writer’s account. Payments for transitioned accepted articles’ credits will be made at least twice per month.

The "transition payments" didn't last long, so the payment procedures are moot. Only one person gets the upfront payment now.

New payment schedule:
Members will now be able to request payments twice per month for credit to their PayPal accounts. Payments will be made on the 15th and the last day of the month.

They did stick with this one, which is nice. In my case, though, my pay dropped so much since all the "improvements" that I can only cash out once every two or three months -- so this perk doesn't actually make much of a difference for me.

What does this mean to us as writers?
All articles on Helium will continue to accrue earnings based on the current ad revenue share system. The new program will encourage directed writing rather than open writing, filling titles in the areas that are most beneficial to the Community. Our methodical and efficient research on highly searched topics on the web has given us an edge for titles that we know people are looking for and want to read. We are passing these great titles on to you and ask you to fill them with your best quality writing.

Again, if what I've heard is true, the "methodical and efficient research on highly searched topics" turned out to be titles written by untrained volunteers or titles copied from other sites. I was not involved in title writing and don't actually know what went on behind the scenes. There is no evidence, though, that any of this worked. Helium's traffic continued to drop throughout the year, and payments received, by all accounts I've heard, have been continuously sliding downhill as well.

In any case, even if the plan worked as advertised, I'm not sure it would have been such a good idea. After Panda came out, it became clear that Google wanted to penalize sites that tried to write based solely or primarily on what people were searching for.

We realize this may seem like an abrupt change, however, after the thorough research we’ve conducted we believe that this is an innovative and positive approach for our Community to earn more and become more visible on the web.

In fact, Helium articles are far less visible now than they were a year ago, and the vast majority of its writers appear to earn only a fraction, per article, of what they were earning, per article, this time a year ago.

... What will the price range for exclusive articles in Marketplace look like?

Most titles that are not limited to certified professionals will be in the $2 to $5 range.

The norm now is $0 to $2. As mentioned before, a $2.50 article is now considered a holiday gift.

Some titles will be listed in Marketplace for $0 upfront, but we believe those titles will be very high ad revenue share earners with high SEO value.

More than half the articles in the assignment system are now $0 upfront -- and from what I've heard, they earn less in revenue share than articles did before this new system was implemented.

My original post about this, written one year ago, is here: Yikes! Helium just killed upfront payments

I like to look for "life lessons" in my experiences, especially the bad ones. I think the lesson here is to be more leery of marketing messages.

It's very easy for me to maintain a distance from, say, commercials on TV and to be clear about what they are trying to do and how they are trying to do it. But when a marketing message is coming from someone I've worked for, I struggle more.

Even though I knew, at least on a conscious level, that this all sounded like b.s. when I first heard it, I still struggled to accept that emotionally, and I took actual offense from the barbs and taunts of the cheerleaders -- when I would rather have been able to calmly see through what they were saying and not have been so reactive.

While the sites may not be trying to sell us on the idea of paying them for stuff, the way a traditional product ad would, the sites are still trying to sell us ideas for their own financial benefit. The more they can convince us that we shouldn't expect much in the way of payment, the better off they will be. It's all marketing, and the same skepticism that comes so easily when the sales pitch is for the uniqueness of one brand of laundry soap should also apply to claims that pay cuts are really for our own good. I'm not sure why this is so much harder for me to accept, emotionally, in a work situation -- especially when some of the promotional methods are so obvious -- but there you have it.

Et tu, WiseGeek?

2011-12-02T18:07:00.000-08:00

WiseGeek -- the third content site to make a major announcement in the past two days -- announced it will stop publishing new content in January. (Hat tip to Rena, again, and to the Demand Studios General Discussion Forum.)

I'll post more information when I have it.

I wonder why all these announcements from all of these sites are coming at the same time. And on top of that, today is the one-year anniversary -- to the day -- that Helium abruptly announced it was scrapping its upfront payment system and substituting the first of its new, confusing systems that paid increasingly lower and lower rates.

Is there something significant about the first two days of December? Are December 1 and 2 like the Ides of March for writers -- dates that hold a special significance and danger? Beware, writers, of the onesies and twosies of the twelfth month?

Is it that the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a good time for a news dump -- a time when people are paying less attention to the news -- a time similar to Friday evenings, the traditional time for politicians to make announcements they hope no one will hear?

Does it have something to do with the companies needing to get things done before the end of the fiscal year -- but not wanting to make a move RIGHT before Christmas, lest they be too easily painted as Scrooges?

It's a puzzle.

Bright Hub is going to stop paying revenue share

2011-12-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

Starting December 15, Bright Hub will no longer pay revenue share on its articles. (Hat tip, again, to Rena for the info).

I hate to say "I told you so" (okay, I lied -- I love to say "I told you so"), but people who write for revenue share, thinking it will fund their retirement, need to think again. Check your contracts. Most of the content-ste companies can stop paying revenue share at any time, for any reason -- and still keep your articles. Or the companies may continue to pay, but secretly tinker with their secret formulas so that you will get a smaller percentage of the total income -- without ever knowing what happened. Then where will all your hard work have gotten you?

Excerpts from the memo the company sent to its contributors are after the jump:

... Like many companies we are facing the reality of a changed economy, while simultaneously working to increase visitors in a post-Panda world. This combination of market forces has required us to make some hard decisions about our business model moving forward, including the elimination of some internal staff positions as well as our ‘Shared Success’ writer program.

Therefore, our current writer and editor roles have ended, effective immediately, and your last payment for revenue-sharing will be on December 15. Any updates or editing of previously created content will be handled by internal staff. And, if we should ever need to delete one of your articles, we will return the article and copyright to you via email, utilizing our current article notification system.

Does this mean we are closing our virtual doors? No.

Bright Hub will continue to focus on our core content areas of Business, Technology and Education, and will be contracting on an ad hoc basis with a small group of writers and editors, who will work closely with our in-house editorial team. Fees for both writing assignments and editing work will be based on the length and depth of content coverage needed....

If you would like to be considered for future contract work, please send a note to support@brighthub.com . This is also the email you should direct any questions or concerns to about the changes we have outlined here...

We understand that for many of you, the time will have come to part ways....

"Associated Content" is now "Yahoo! Voices"

2011-12-01T16:01:00.000-08:00

The "Associated Content" name and domain are gone, may they rest in peace. All AC content was moved to the voices.yahoo.com domain, except for our profile pages, which are still at contributor.yahoo.com.

In case you haven't seen it, there's an official introductory memo that seems to explain everything.

I just glanced at it, and haven't really looked around the new site beyond the front page, which does look nice.

I probably won't be following much of the cheering or gnashing of teeth (whichever it may be) going on in the forums. I'm only peripherally involved in AC -- oops, Yahoo Voices -- now, and as long as I get my "metro beat" assignments, I'll be happy. I'm also using AC -- oops, I did it again -- it's going to take me a while to get used to this -- I'm also using Yahoo Voices as a place to park my rants about TV and other things that don't have much commercial value (and don't fit into any of my existing blogs) but that I want to inflict on the world anyway.

The biggest change that I can see is that all articles will now be a single page. That means less revenue share, and it also means that some existing articles will take a lot of scrolling to get through. Going forward, I guess the basic strategy for writing for Yahoo Voices (ha -- I got it right that time) for people who want to maximize their revenue share is to break articles down and submit several short ones instead of a single long one. This won't affect articles previously published on Yahoo ("regular" Yahoo), though, as those were always only a single page.

Maybe in the end it will work out for the best. Without the content-farming stigma of the "Associated Content," name, maybe our articles will be seen in a more favorable light. Not that anyone (least of all Google) would be fooled by a name change, but it could be a part of a new start.

Textbroker is opening a new site for UK English

2011-12-01T10:31:00.000-08:00

Textbroker opened a new site today -- textbroker.co.uk -- for writing assignments in British, Canadian, and Australian English. Payment is in euros. (Hat tip to Rena for the info.) You can find out more in the press release.

Editing to add: The new site is open only to writers outside the U.S. because of tax issues.

November 2011 content-site income

2011-12-01T08:54:00.000-08:00

My content-site income went downhill this month.

I did a lot of work in November, though, that I haven't gotten paid for yet. Since I'm counting income at the time it was received, I expect next month's totals will be higher.

November earnings:

more after the jump:

Income is down from last month, but it's higher than it was a year ago, and higher than my overall average (since starting the blog).

Change from last month:

Looking at the long term, my biggest losers (compared to last year and to the overall average) were Demand Studios and Helium. My biggest gains came from my new sites, WriterAccess and CloudCrowd. The gains were larger than the losses -- so my new sites are more than compensating for the loss of income from Demand Studios and Helium:

Change from average:

Change from last year:

Notes:

WriterAccess: On my third month of payment, I received $177.49, up from $96.51 last month.

CloudCrowd: I was down by about half this month, compared to last month ($147.85, down from $302.15). It depends on what kinds of projects are available. (affiliate link)

Demand Studios: This was the first month in more than a year and a half (since April 2010) where I wrote no articles at all for Demand Studios. Ouch.

Even though I'm in "first look," I couldn't find anything within my areas of knowledge.

I received $55.32 in revenue share (for four articles). This was down from last month's payment of $63.32, but was still the second-highest revenue share payment I've received there.

Helium: I didn't make enough to cash out.

My Helium revenue share was even lower than it was last month (perhaps in part because I had quite a few days where I lost my eligibility to get paid, due to rating stars "winking out"). Not sure of the exact amount because at the moment, Helium's pay-reporting system is broken, but I think it was around 8 dollars and change for 266 articles.

Yahoo Contributor Network: I changed the name on my spreadsheet from "Associated Content" to "Yahoo" because the company is ditching the "Associated Content" name and domain and moving everything over to a "Yahoo Contributor" domain. That's supposed to happen later today.

This month, I wrote two Yahoo news ("metro beat") articles, for a total upfront payment of $31.50. I received only $2.61 in revenue share for 155 articles.

Constant Content: I wrote and sold one article for full rights for $16.25 net ($25 gross).

Textbroker: I'm only doing a little bit there. I may do more if I get promoted to a higher level.

Blogging: I'm not counting this in my spreadsheet, but I got a payment of 12 dollars and change from Amazon Affliates.

Interact/Zerys -- another article marketplace in the Textbroker and WriterAccess mode

2011-11-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

I found this site (Interact Media, aka Zerys Content Marketplace) through a Craigslist ad. It's another site, like Textbroker and WriterAccess, that brings together writers and clients for specific assignments -- some open to all writers, others direct assignments. It even uses the same two-to-five star rating system.

This is the ad. (They use the name Zerys on the ad, but Interact Media on the site itself -- I think Interact is the parent company):

The Zerys Content Marketplace is an award-winning content management platform developed for the purpose of bringing together content buyers and providers. We post thousands of jobs each week, and our client base is growing rapidly. We need experienced writers to join our network and become part of the content marketing revolution!

With our unique system, buyers use specialized set-up tools to create a list of titles they'd like to have written, along with writer instructions and other job details. Then, they can either post these titles to the writer job board, or assign them directly to you. When buyers order directly from you, they pay you the per-word rate you specify in your profile, or any rate you negotiate with them.

When you first apply, we will review a unique writing sample from you and give you an initial quality rating of 2-5 stars. After that, your rating will be based on buyer ratings. Buyers can search writers by quality ratings, so the higher your rating, the more likely you are to get higher paying jobs.

During the application process, you will enter the pay rate you wish to charge per word for direct assignments. Payments are made every 2 weeks through your PayPal account.

If you're interested in becoming a writer in the Zerys network, please apply here:

http://admin.interactmedia.com/apply.aspx

Thank you!

Here's their writers' FAQ page. Other than what I saw in the ad and on their site, I know nothing about this company. Has anyone worked for them? If so, what was it like?

Beware: Fake ad agency contacting self-hosted WordPress bloggers

2011-11-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

I recently received an email from someone named Noa Morin at a company called the Kara Agency, saying she wanted to run a banner ad on one of my self-hosted WordPress blogs and asking me to quote a price.

She accepted the price right away, then said she wanted me to install a plug-in on my site that would display the ads. She said, after I asked, that the company advertising was Lacoste.

Long story short, this is a scam. Someone has been sending out the same emails under different "agency" names. The agencies are fakes. Their websites are duplicate copies of another website, with just the agency name changed. The original website, which all the others were copied from, may or may not be legit itself. The domain names for the duplicate websites were registered only days before email started being sent out under their names.

(more details after the jump)
First contact:

From: "Noa Morin" 〈nmorin@karaagency.com〉

Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Hi,

We are looking for new advertisement platforms and we are interested in your site www.-------.com.
Is it possible to place banner on your site on a fee basis?

Best regards,
Noa Morin

At this point, I thought it was probably a scam. Despite a recent spike in traffic, which I expected to be short-lived, my site had been semi-dormant for a long time, and its usual traffic patterns wouldn't justify someone contacting me out of the blue to ask about advertising. The karaagency.com site was nicely designed, though, with a look that seemed creative enough to be a real site for an advertising agency. So I wasn't sure.

Figuring I had nothing to lose, as it probably wasn't a legit offer -- but responding just in case it was -- I replied, quoting a high weekly price. I got this response:

Hi!
Payments will be processed automatically every month, that's why we ask the price per month. There is no option in our billing system to make 1 week prepaid. Please offer your price per month

Best regards,
Noa Morin.
site: www.karaagency.com
e-mail: nmorin@karaagency.com
phone: + (0)9 78 62 31 00

This seemed odd and didn't make much sense. But still playing along and curious to see what they were up to, I responded with a monthly price which was much higher than the going rate (which I had just researched) for advertising on a site with traffic like mine. I figured in the unlikely chance that they were legit, they could make a lower counteroffer. I got this response:

Hi!

Thanks for reply to our proposal!
We like your price.
To pass to the banner control system follow the link http://webmaster.karaagency.com
To enter use the following data:

login: ----------
password: -------------

You should install and activate the plugin in order to display advertisement. Before making payment, advertiser must approve location of the banner. The banner will be shown on your site when you add special code to your web- address (for example: http://www.-----------.com/?adv_test=1). It means, that visitors will see the banner only if it is approved and payment made.

To get installation instruction for your site type pass to: http://docs.karaagency.com/wp_install
To activate your site you have to enter the code: ----------

What way of payment is suitable for you?

This rang a lot of alarm bells. Why would they accept my (hugely inflated) price without even asking about my site traffic and visitor demographics? Why would they want me to install a plug-in? Plug-ins can be dangerous -- they can take over the whole blog. In my limited experience with blog advertising, I just put javascript code in the sidebars.

I wrote back asking them what advertisements they would be showing, why she thought my blog's audience would be a good fit for their advertisers, and whether I could veto objectionable ads. I thought if they were scammers, they just wouldn't answer, but I did get this response:

Hi!
I represent Kara Agency. At the moment we are preparing an advertising campaign for Lacoste Company (it is a French company producing clothes, footwear, perfumery etc.)

Plugin installation doesn't mean that banner will appear on your site, it won't until payment is made. It is needed to let the advertiser check your site and decide if it fits his requirements.
If advertiser like your site, you receive payment and only after it, the banner will appear.

No, we don't ask you to change your URL.This test link is given you to see how the banner would look and where it would be placed.( but in fact it is not on your site, you can see in only when you add "?adv_test=1")

This was the first I had heard that the ad had to be approved by the advertiser -- I thought the agency had already accepted my offer. Also, my blog's audience is pretty geeky, and I couldn't imagine why someone representing a high-end designer clothing and perfume company would choose a geeky blog to run their ads. No offense to geeks, but they (we) are not the first group that usually comes to mind when someone thinks about who is most likely to spend a lot of money on cutting-edge fashion. My blog readers, actually, almost never click on anything, not even on things I expect they would like. Ads for expensive perfume would not be a big hit.

I asked a friend who knows WordPress PHP coding to look at the plug-in (which I had downloaded, but NOT installed). She said it looked okay, that it was just pulling ads off the agency's server.

Still, my gut was saying "Don't do it."

A web search for "Noa Morin" and "Kara Agency" showed a lot of identical comments left on blogs saying she wanted to run banner ads on their sites and that she was leaving a message in the comments because she couldn't find their contact information. The comments all ended, almost whimsically, with the line "P.S. Please delete this comment." Nothing else was showing up in my searches.

At that point, I decided to just drop it. I was afraid there was a chance I was letting an opportunity slip away, which I would hate to pass up because I had been hoping to make some money with that particular blog for a long time. The plug-in itself was apparently clean, and some people were urging me to go for it. I had some doubts about my own reactions, wondering if I was being overly suspicious or even paranoid. In the end, though, I decided to listen to my gut, and I figured that any money I might get (if the agency turned out to be legit) wouldn't be worth the stress of worrying about what the plug-in might be doing to my blog, which was a long-term labor of love.

About a week later, still curious, I did another Google search. This time, someone had left comments on the blogs where Noa Morin had left comments with a link to his own site describing his experiences with the Noa Morin emails. The link was a bit.ly link, which in itself raised questions, but after reading the page, I was convinced it was legit.

This blogger did two things that were very clever, which I wish I had thought of doing myself. First, he looked at the karaagency's whois page. The registration was privacy protected, which is very odd, I think, for a company. Individuals, yes, but companies, no. Also, the domain name had only been registered 10 days before the first email was sent. Second, the blogger called Lacoste, and they said they had never heard of the Kara Agency.

Some more web searching showed that other people had received the same emails sent under different names. Then, instead of searching on "Noa Morin" and "Kara Agency," I searched on "scam banner Lacoste" (without the quotation marks) which brought up a lot of new stuff, including Devious Scam Aimed at Bloggers, which gives a very good description of the whole experience, and Keep Safe on the Net, which has a lot of comments from people who have received the emails sent under various names.

It is 100% certain that this is a scam because the email senders change the name of the "agency" every few weeks, and the agency sites, under all the different names, are all clones of each other. No one though, that I am aware of, has yet figured out exactly how the scam works. The consensus view is that the code in the plug-in is benign, and that the harm would probably come from the pictures or links in the ads that people would click on. Another possibility, this one rather diabolically clever, is that the scammers would introduce malicious code via plug-in updates. Most people routinely accept all updates without even thinking about it, much less checking the update code. The scammers could slip anything in that way. My guess is that they are trying to distribute spyware or other kinds of malicious code.

What I learned from this experience:

1. Trust my gut.

2. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." That old saying still applies.

3. I'm not paranoid, I'm prudent. (This time, anyway.)

4. Never install a WordPress plug-in that doesn't come from the official WordPress site.

5. Don't try to jump the gun. My sites don't have enough traffic for pay-per-view advertising from large companies. When and if they ever do, I can work through more normal channels.

6. When "Noa" first contacted me, I became curious about how much I could reasonably charge direct advertisers. I found this article, which was helpful, and now I know: How much should I charge for my advertising space? (Problogger)

Cutting the last piece of the umbilical cord tying me to Helium

2011-11-11T07:51:00.000-08:00

I am finally going to sever the last strand of the umbilical cord still tying me to Helium. I have stopped rating, which was the last thing I was doing there (besides lurking in the forums).

Once my old rates "fall off," I won't get paid any more for my articles' revenue share.

I'd be wasting my time if I kept on rating, especially when I don't trust the accuracy of the rating scores. My revenue share at Helium is down to less than $10 per month now for my 266 articles. The time I would have to spend rating to get that $10 would be better spent doing something else to earn more money.

Besides, I hate rating with the heat of a thousand burning suns. Most of the articles are so badly written, they are painful to read. Some Heliumites believe they become better writers by reading bad writing -- they think it teaches them what not to do. As a writer, though, you are what you read. Read something skillfully written, and you will get better. Read crap, and your writing will turn to ... well, to crap. As the computer people say, garbage in, garbage out.

It pisses me off that Helium will get to pocket my revenue share. I wrote many of my articles at Helium before the company even dreamed up the idea of rating and writing stars, back when it enticed writers with promises our work would earn pennies forever. There was no hint back then that there would be extra conditions we'd have to meet before collecting our so-called "passive" income -- much less that they would be arbitrary conditions, out of our control, based on secret algorithms that probably aren't even working correctly.

{edited 11/13/11 to add} To be fair, I have also written many articles at Helium even after they started requiring a rating star (i.e., a writing score above 75%) to get paid. So some of this is on my own head, for going along with it. For most of the time, though, the rating-score system was working okay -- I was able to consistently keep a rating star and get credit for all of my revenue share. However, there was a time a few years ago when the scores became wonky, and my score fell below the qualifying cut-off point, and no matter what I did, I could not get it back up. I actually did quit the site then because of that (only coming back later when I saw a Marketplace publisher I wanted to write for). At the time, after months of arguing about it on the forum and being told nothing was wrong and that it was my own fault because I didn't know how to rate, they finally did fix it -- my score suddenly rose and stayed in the qualifying range. They never admitted there had been anything wrong. It's a peculiarity of Helium that they don't like to say that their system has bugs. Instead, they said that they had enhanced the system to make it even better, or some nonsense like that.

This time feels similar, except that I am older and wiser and know I shouldn't waste time arguing. I wrote four detailed emails to the Help Desk, and that's all I am going to do. My 90-day score (the one that counts) did rise above the cut-off point yesterday, and my 30-day score rose from 58% to 100% (!). I'll keep an eye on the scores for a while and see what happens, out of curiosity. Even if I did get paid consistently for my revenue share, I would still be making less than $10/month, which is not enough to justify continuing to rate. { end of edited-to-add 11/13/11 }

I have to be practical and avoid investing time in projects that aren't worth it. After more than five years of hanging on at Helium, though, it's a bit difficult to cut that last little grisly strand of cord.

Editing to add 11/20/11 I caved. I got tired of my 90-day score repeatedly dipping below the 75% cut-off point, even though I still have 45 90-day rates (more than enough, when the minimum is 30). Will be doing five rates today to add to my existing five 30-day rates (which are currently scored at 100%) to try to get my pennies that way.

Helium rating scores are wonky

2011-11-11T07:14:00.000-08:00

Something seems to be wrong with the Helium rating machine.

On three non-consecutive days within the first 10 days of November, my 90-day rating score at Helium was 74.29% -- exactly the same score out to two decimal places.

(Helium ties rating scores to revenue-share payments. On any day when my rating score goes below 75%, Helium gets to keep my articles' revenue share income for that day.)

My 90-day scores have been fluctuating within a 30-point range. I think the odds of my getting the exact same score twice, much less three times, within 10 days would have to be close to zero. It looks like a gear needs to be kicked in the Helium rating machine. It's not the first time there has been a bug in the rating-score system.

Editing to add 11/12/11: My 90-day score went up to 78.18% today, so I'm getting pennies for the first time in three days. What's weird is that my 30-day score today is 100% -- and it was 58% a few days ago, for the same exact five rates (no new rates added, no old ones falling off). I know the scores get more volatile the fewer rates you have, but how can the numbers mean anything at all if they can swing so widely? If I get 100% I must be a good rater, right? If I get 58% I must be a terrible rater, right? Oh, wait, I'm the same rater, getting scores that vary by 42 points for the same exact rates.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, I'm going to keep track of all of my scores (yes, I am that anal), starting today. If I hit the magic number 74.29% again, I'll highlight it in red:

90 day 30 day
Date No. of rates | Score No. of rates | Score
11/12/11............45............78.18%.................5............100.00%
11/13/11............45............79.51%.................5............100.00%
11/14/11............45............78.05%.................5............100.00%
11/15/11............45............75.12%.................5............100.00%
11/16/11............45............72.20%.................5............100.00% no pay
11/17/11............45............76.59%.................5............100.00%
11/18/11............45............75.12%.................5............100.00%
11/19/11............45............67.80%.................5............100.00% no pay
11/20/11............45............73.66%.................5............100.00% no pay

11/20/11 There have been no reoccurrences of the mysterious 74.29% in the chart above, but 75.12% popped up twice, both times right before the 90-day scores dropped below the payment cut-off point the next day.

I'm getting tired of not getting my pennies, so I'm going to break my vow to stop rating and try to "qualify" via my 30-day score. Since that requires a minimum of 10 30-day rates, I will do five rates today.

11/21/11 It worked, and I'm back in the money, at least for today, even though my 90-day score is still below the cut-off.

11/21/11............50...........73.91%................10............100.00%
11/22/11............50...........73.91%................10............100.00%
11/23/11............50...........68.70%................10..............80.00%
11/24/11............50...........73.91%................10............100.00%
11/26/11............50...........76.92%................10............100.00%
11/27/11............50...........76.92%................10............100.00%

I think I see what's happening now. The scores are sometimes stable, and other times they move in large or small jumps. My score hasn't landed on 74.29% since I started this tally, but it has gotten "stuck" on some other numbers. My guess is that the scores stay stable when none of the articles in the groups I have rated are re-rated on that particular date. Perhaps a jump to the same number on non-consecutive days means that the sort order in one group of articles changed -- and then changed back to where it started a few days later.

So perhaps there is no bug in the system after all -- perhaps it is working as designed. I believe the way it's designed, though, is unfair. Why should my scores -- which determine if I get paid or not for the revenue share for the articles I have written for the site -- hinge on how other people have rated the articles of third parties? And since when is voting with the majority necessarily desirable?

11/28/11............50...........75.00%................10............100.00%
11/29/11............50...........76.52%................10..............88.00%
11/30/11............50...........75.00%................10............100.00%
12/2/11..............55...........76.92%..................9............100.00%

12/2/11 Did five new rates yesterday, to replace five that were expiring from the 30-day score. Don't know why I only got credit for four of them, but I will do one more today to top the score off.

12/3/11..............56...........80.00%.................10...........100.00%
12/4/11..............56...........78.57%.................10.............76.00%

That's a 24% drop in the 30-day score, overnight.

12/5/11..............56...........75.77%.................10.............76.00%
12/6/11..............56...........74.62%.................10.............76.00%
12/7/11..............56...........73.75%.................10.............76.00%
12/8/11..............56...........75.77%.................10.............76.00%
12/9/11..............56...........72.31%.................10.............70.00% no pay

The same 10 rates that were graded 100% less than a week ago, are now graded 70%. How can these grades possibly have any meaning?

12/10/11.............35...........75.62%.................10.............76.00%

Twenty-one rates "fell off" the group counted for my 90-day score, but my score went up enough to put me back in the money, for now.

12/12/11.............35...........80.00%.................10............100.00%

And now, the 30-day score popped up from 70% a few days ago, to 100% today.

1/8/12 Decided to start keeping track of this again because the scores have been especially wonky recently.

90 day 30 day
Date No. of rates | Score No. of rates | Score

1/8/12.................28.........100.00%.................11..............65.71% no pay

How is that even possible? The 30 day scores are a subset of the 90 day score. How can my score have been perfect (100%) for the last 90 days, but low for 30 of those 90 days?

I did two new rates:

1/9/12.................30...........91.43%..................13..............60.00%
1/10/12...............30...........91.43%..................13..............66.67%
1/11/12...............30..........100.00%.................13..............73.33%
1/12/12...............30............91.43%.................13.............100.00%

The 30 day score returned to 91.43%, but the 13-day score jumped 26.67% overnight.

1/13/12...............30...........91.43%.................13.............100.00%
1/14/12...............30...........91.43%.................13.............100.00%
1/15/12.............. 30...........91.43%.................13..............70.00%
1/19/12...............30...........82.86%.................13..............73.33%
1/20/12...............30...........92.50%.................13.............100.00%

October 2011 content site income

2011-10-31T23:19:00.000-07:00

I Made Six Bills

Continued to diversity this month and to set, and try to stick to, daily goals.

October earnings:

more after the jump:

Change from last month:

Change from average:

Change from last year:

Notes:

CloudCrowd: This, surprisingly, turned out to be my top earner this month. I have a like-hate relationship with this site, but the pennies do add up. (affiliate link)

Demand Studios: It's been a while since I've seen any $25 articles, and even though I made it into "first look," there have been no titles that I could write to at all in the last few weeks, just a lot of titles on home repair, which I know less than nothing about. I only wrote five $16 articles this month. The good news is that my revenue share again hit a new high, paying $63.32, which is up from $53.55 last month, still for four articles.

WriterAccess: This was the second month I got paid, and I received $96.51, up from $67.23 my first month. I got promoted to a higher level, got added to even more "love lists," and things are going well there.

Helium: I was able to cash out for the first time since two-and-a-half months ago (you need a minimum of $25). Revenue share for October was $9.84, down slightly from last month, for an average of four cents per article. I didn't write any new articles.

Textbroker: This month was the first time I got paid there. I'm still at Level 3, and the articles at that level have mostly dried up, possibly from an influx of Demand Studios refugees.

Associated Content/Yahoo Contributor Network: I didn't write any new articles. I received $14.84 in revenue share, most of it from a single article that did well in Yahoo News.

Are there other places for writers like Demand Studios?

2011-10-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

Demand Studios titles have dried up for most DS writers. Even many of the 15 percent, or so, who are in “First Look” are finding little or nothing to write. A question keeps on popping up on the DS forums: Are there other sites that are like Demand Studios?

The short answer is “no.” But while there are no sites exactly like Demand Studios, I think it’s possible to cobble together a substitute that is at least satisfactory and potentially much better.

The best path out of Demand Studios probably depends on the path you took to get there in the first place. Roughly speaking, there seem to be three partially-overlapping groups at DS: people who chose DS because they wanted to work at home, people who were career writers, and people who enjoyed picking titles from a list.

More after the jump

Working at home

Demand Studios is hardly the only work-at-home option. The best resource for finding other work-at-home jobs is the WAHM forums. The site is aimed at moms, but you don’t have to be a mom or even female to join. Just looking at the forum titles will give you an idea of the huge range of things that people have done to make money at home, and the discussions themselves are quite active.

Writing

To look for other online writing jobs, Google “writers wanted,” check Craigslist (but be wary of scammers), and bookmark some of the many sites that list writing jobs, such as Freelance Writing Gigs, the Absolute Write forums, Freelance Writing Jobs, and Write Jobs. Keep on reading the Demand Studios general forum, too. I found my now-favorite writing site because someone on the DS forums was raving about it.

I'd suggest staying away from revenue-share sites, for the most part, especially sites that have been targeted by Panda. The best bet now is to work for clients directly or for sites (such as Constant Content, WriterAccess, and Textbroker), which act as middlemen between writers and publishers.

To branch out beyond online writing, check out the job listings at Media Bistro and take a look at the classic guide, the Writer's Market.. If you buy the deluxe edition, you’ll get a year’s free subscription to their online database as well.

If you were mostly a creative writer before DS, this could be a good opportunity to find new, more interesting projects that don’t require writing about computer-generated topics while typing into little boxes.

If you had professional writing experience before DS, brainstorm new ways to get back in touch with old contacts.

Picking titles from a list

It may seem silly, but one part of writing for content sites that always appealed to me was browsing through lists of titles. It’s not that I couldn’t think of my own topics to write about, but seeing those lists somehow kick-started my brain.

Textbroker and WriterAccess both have lists of requested titles. While their pay rates are often (though not always) less than Demand Studios' rates, you can usually write articles for them faster than was possible at DS. Also, both offer the chance of being selected for direct orders at potentially higher rates.

Don't burn bridges

While it may be tempting to leave DS with a bang, you can't predict what will happen next at this company, which has always been unpredictable. They could come up with new projects some day that would be just what you were looking for. I certainly wouldn't count on it -- but I wouldn't rule it out either.

I banned myself from the Helium forums

2011-10-20T19:46:00.000-07:00

Enough is enough. After being threatened with banishment from the Helium boards, I started looking forward to it. Thinking about being banned felt so good, in fact, that I decided to ban myself.

(more after the jump)

This is the last tirade I am going to put up with:

"May, I really don't know why you keep doing this to yourself. You like to twist everything that others say into something that they never said. My patience is very thin. Take this as a board warning....

"Please desist from the path you normally take. I do not like being heavy handed. I've shown that. I will if I need to. I've shown that, too. The boards WILL remain positive and calm, and we will NOT go back to the pre-2008 era."

My transgression? Correcting the board moderator when he wrote something that was wrong. This is too Ike-and-Tina-Turner for me. Buh-bye, Helium board.

Big changes at Helium and Demand Studios

2011-10-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

Photo by Jonas B

I've been a critic of Helium since the disastrous retooling of the site in December 2010, but I have to give credit where credit is due: Helium took a huge step forward this week by announcing plans to publish page views and pay rates. Moving towards greater transparency sets a whole new positive tone for this formerly secretive company.

More after the jump

Helium is also changing the way it calculates revenue share. The company's blog post revealed the old payment formula, for the first time, and it turns out the formula relied heavily on the site's rating system, giving more income to articles with higher ratings. The new revenue share system will pay strictly by page views, which I believe is a lot more fair, considering how flawed the rating system is. In a way, it's an admission that the rating system, the site's original claim to distinction (even the site's name, Helium, referred to the way the rating system was supposed to lift quality to the top), no longer carries much weight.

Pay rates were posted on the forum. They vary by category (topic), and the current range is $1.25 to $2.00 per thousand page views.

Demand Studios seems to be moving in the opposite direction, away from transparency. It soon became clear that the vaguely-worded memo sent out on Oct. 5 meant there would be little work left for writers and editors who weren't assigned to special projects -- and this was after months of the company claiming that the slowdown was only temporary and/or was a technical glitch. Confusion still reigns because after the "buh-bye" announcement, DS then announced a program to help writers new to the site. There are no titles, but they are hiring new writers? No one seems to know what is going on, but suspicions are running high.

Citi analysts calls Demand Studio's quality strategy "a work in progress"

2011-10-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

A Citigroup analyst dropped his price target on Demand Media from $10 to $8, saying "We view the company’s reliance on Google traffic as still a bit of an overhang. And we believe DMD’s quality content strategy is still something of a work-in-progress."

Interesting timing, considering the email Demand sent out last night to writers and editors.

Fickle Fools now like RR Donnelley

2011-10-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

I had written earlier about how the analysts at the Motley Fool website gave RR Donnelley (Helium's parent company) a strong thumbs down and then, later, mixed reviews.

This week, the Fools gave the printing company two thumbs up.

One columnist wrote that the RRD stock "may be about to take off" because "positive inventory divergence" suggests "management sees increased demand on the horizon."

A second columnist put RRD in his list of the eight "S&P 500 losers" most likely to have a big rebound, based on a significant decrease in the number of short-sellers in the last month.

RRD also got good press from The Street, which put it on its list of "5 rocket stocks to buy in October," because of insider buying and its high dividend yield.

Disclaimer: I am not a stock-market expert and am just pointing out interesting tea-leaf readings I've come across on the intertubes. I think it would be a huge risk to invest in anything right now, with the economy as shaky as it is -- you'd need nerves of steel and the soul of a gambler.

Is this the end of the line for eHow titles?

2011-10-05T16:37:00.000-07:00

Anyone get the memo from DS? What does it mean? I saw the words "We are excited," and I passed out before I could read it. ;-)

Really, could it be any more vague?

September 2011 content-site income

2011-10-01T03:56:00.000-07:00

Broke $500 this month

I hit a new record again this month (counting only from the time I started this blog). It's still not much, but at least it's going in the right direction.

I wrote less for Demand Studios, but made up for it with my two new sites, CloudCrowd and WriterAccess.

September earnings:

more after the jump:

Change from last month:

Change from average:

Change from last year:

Notes:

Demand Studios: Lost some steam and only wrote six new articles, for $150. My revenue share went up again, though, to $53.55 (a big jump from the previous high of last month's $39.75), still for the same four articles.

Helium: Wrote three new articles, but none paid upfronts, and I did not make enough revenue share to cash out. Revenue share for the month for my 267 articles was $11.19, essentially the same as last month.

Associated Content/Yahoo Contributor Network: Made $40 in upfronts for doing one assignment and two "beat" articles for Yahoo News. (The assignment got a lot of hits, and the revenue share for that will show up in next month's spreadsheet.) This time, I only got $2.48 in revenue share, pretty much the same as last month, for my 160 articles on AC and Yahoo combined.

CloudCrowd: It's been a rocky ride here, and the system to appeal rejections is f----ed up, but I enjoy the work itself. I do much more editing than writing here, and I do like editing, which sometimes puts me into a flow state. (affiliate link)

WriterAccess: This is the most hassle-free content site I've worked for. I could see sticking with this one for the long haul. WA is similar to Textbroker, but WA is paying me more than four times as much per word, has more interesting projects, and seems to be more on my wavelength overall -- the feedback, for example, makes more sense.

Textbroker: I started writing here this month, but haven't cashed out yet. The main advantages of Textbroker are that it always has work and that almost nothing gets rejected or even sent back for rewrites.

Updates on WriterAccess, CloudCrowd, Textbroker, Demand Studios, and Helium

2011-09-24T10:45:00.000-07:00

I recently signed up for a trio of new (to me) sites. I've been active on WriterAccess and CloudCrowd for a little less than two months, and I've been at Textbroker for a few weeks.

WriterAccess

I've settled in here, writing mostly for two clients with ongoing assignments -- one marketing copy for a catalog, the other news items for law-firm blogs. It's working out very well for me -- it's one of my favorite sites now -- though people who have come in at a lower level (the site assigns "levels" to all writers, which determine the pay rates and the projects they can work on) say they are having trouble finding things to do. (More info)

CloudCrowd

My second month here is going much better than my first. I'm doing mostly editing now, with some writing here and there. My score has climbed, I'm getting a bigger choice of assignments, and I'm probably making (roughly) about $10 to $15 per hour. Best of all, I love to edit. It relaxes me, and is a great change of pace from writing. (More info | My referral link)

Textbroker

Textbroker is similar to WriterAccess (or perhaps I should say WriterAccess is similar to Textbroker, since Textbroker has been around a lot longer) -- but it pays less. It's a double whammy for me because (1) each level on TB pays less than the equivalent level on WA, and (2) I came in on a lower level -- a 3 -- on TB than I did on WA -- a 4..

Here's a comparison of the pay rates, in cents per word, by level (the WriterAccess pay rates are minimums and often go higher):

If you are looking at this post in the future, you can find current pay rates here: Textbroker pay rates and WriterAccess pay rates.

It's not worth it to me to be writing for one cent per word, but I'm doing some stuff there in the hopes that I might soon be promoted to a higher level.

Also, Textbroker has two advantages: (1) They have a lot of work. There is always something available. (2) The work is easy, and the standards, especially compared to sites like Demand Studios, are low. Also, as a Textbroker writer helpfully pointed out to me, if you click on the client number in a job order, you will see what percentage of articles the client sends back for rewrites, and what percentage it rejects. It's shocking to see how many clients never reject or even ask for rewrites on anything -- which makes writing there totally stress-free.

The downside is that some of the assignments are pointless exercises in keyword stuffing. This is not a place to practice doing your best work.

In the last few weeks, Textbroker also started a new program, which has "team orders" and "casting calls" -- concepts perhaps borrowed from WriterAccess' "love lists" and "casting calls" -- which enable you to apply directly to specific clients to be put on preferred lists for assignments -- and the clients can pay above your usual rate. (More info)

Demand Studios

Are the glory days of the $25 eHow Money articles over? At this moment, as we speak, there are no $25 Money titles available at all. Whether they will come back is anyone's guess, as DS tends to be very secretive about things like this.

Meanwhile, there are lots of new $16 titles for Home & Garden, so I guess I need to try to get in touch with my inner decorator.

I've been doing less at DS this month -- feeling burnt out on the research needed for the finance articles, while they were available. (More info)

Helium

Helium has a new Community Manager, and perhaps because of that, there has been a flurry of new activity around the site, with a lot of pulse-taking of members' opinions. My take is that they are going to continue along the road towards becoming more of a "fun" site that offers contest prizes rather than consistent or reliable payments. Outside of Content Source (Helium's new name for Marketplace, which is by application or invitation only), the site may be of little use for writers who rely on content writing for income. Still, when reading entries in the "tell us what you think of us" contest, I was struck by how strongly some of the site's active members/volunteers felt that Helium provided them with an online writing home. (More info)

CEO of Yahoo was fired

2011-09-06T20:55:00.000-07:00

Carol Bartz, former Yahoo CEO

Yahoo's board of directors unexpectedly fired the Yahoo CEO today, in the hopes that shaking things up at the top would reverse the company's poor performance.

The Wall Street Journal is saying that Yahoo is also "open to selling itself to the right bidder."

So the big fish (Yahoo) that swallowed the smaller fish (Associated Content) might itself be gobbled up by an even bigger fish.

And the writers? Fish food, I guess.

August 2011 content-site income

2011-09-01T09:17:00.000-07:00

This was my second-best month (after last month) for content-site income since I started this blog.

Most of my earnings again came from Demand Studios.

I also started writing at two new sites this month -- CloudCrowd and WriterAccess.

August earnings:

more after the jump:

Change from last month:

Change from average:

Change from last year:

Notes:

Demand Studios: Made less than I did last month, in part because I lost some writing time to pre-hurricane panic.

The $25/article rate for business and finance articles, which was originally supposed to be a temporary raise ending at the end of June, was extended and is still in effect. It's getting harder to find titles, though.

Total income was $345.75, down from $464.37 last month, because I wrote fewer articles. Income from my four revenue-share articles was up, though, again hitting a new high -- $39.75, up from $33.37 last month, for an average of $9.94 per article, up from $8.34.

Helium: I was able to cash out for the first time in two months. Revenue share for my 264 articles in August was $11.26, down slightly from $11.64 in July. Average revenue share per article for the month was four cents.

Associated Content/Yahoo Contributor Network: Revenue share was $2.42, down from $2.94 last month, for 159 articles on AC and Yahoo combined. That comes out to 1.5 cents per article, down from 1.8 cents last month.

CloudCrowd -- After a rocky start at this crowd-sourcing Facebook app, I got my editing and writing credentials approved and started to get the hang of working with their system, glitches and all.

WriterAccess: I started there this month and made $67. Since they pay each month for the previous month's work, and since I'm counting earnings as of the time they are paid, the income will show up in next month's spreadsheet.

Wikio Experts closing

2011-09-01T08:06:00.000-07:00

Photo by Steve Snodgrass

I signed up but hadn't yet gotten around to writing for Wikio Experts, a multi-lingual content site based in France. Now they are closing down their article site and morphing into a paid-for-blogging platform.

They sent out this email today:

Dear Users,

We launched Wikio Experts as a venture earlier this year, and it has been a great learning experience for ourselves and our online community. We’ve published thousands of excellent articles and have grown a fantastic community of talented writers.

We are now setting our sites [sic] on a new, flexible and improved service; closer to your needs, and more advanced than Wikio Experts. We will be closing Wikio Experts and creating a new service alongside our blogging platform Overblog, which already provides an online publishing service for thousands of writers across Europe. We’re aiming to launch this new product towards the end of September this year, and we’ll provide you with everything you need to get started beforehand.

(more after the jump)

This new product will allow you to publish your articles on OverBlog, even if you don’t have a blog. It’ll replace www.the-experts.co.uk, which will be discontinued and its content moved across. The revamped service will offer exciting new features, better suiting your needs.

The development of this service is dependent upon the collaboration of all parties involved. As you will be more involved in your work, from start to finish, you have everything to gain from us through a new revenue sharing remuneration model. Furthermore, in keeping with this shift toward a more autonomous service, we will allow you to choose the topics and titles you want to write about; rather than us determining these for you.

We believe this is the way to ensure our future successes together as publishers and as writers.

We hope you continue your journey with us to help shape the future of digital media together.

We will reveal more soon. A new and exciting adventure begins!

Best wishes,
Team Wikio Experts

The "new revenue sharing remuneration model" is likely to be revenue-share only. In any case, it doesn't sound like this "new and exciting adventure" will be my cup of tea. I've already had one disastrous experience with a blogging network (cough, Today.com). Even if this one is well-run, I'd rather do my blogging on my own and keep total ownership and control.

Fools disagree about future of RR Donnelley

2011-08-30T06:22:00.000-07:00

On the personal finance/investing site fool.com, writers disagreed about RR Donnelley's financial health.

On the nay side, Navjot Kaur pointed to the huge decline in net income for the quarter -- $12.2 million, down from $88.8 million a year ago. On the yea side, Ilan Moscovitz says RR Donnelley "might be more profitable -- and its stock much cheaper -- than many investors realize."

If you look at the stock chart, you'll see RRD stock took a nosedive in late July/early August, losing about a quarter of its value. It's starting to come back up now, though it's still 27% below where it was on July 7.

RRD may or may not be a good gamble for traders who like to buy stocks when they are down -- but what does this uncertainty mean for Helium writers? If there are any writers left who still hold onto the dream that passive income from Helium articles will fund their retirement (and a surprising number of Helium writers did, and maybe still do, believe this), now might be a good time to let go of that illusion and look for a safer bet.

The Panda Effect

2011-08-25T08:31:00.000-07:00

Take a look at these graphs that show how Google's Panda hurt many content sites -- and also, at the bottom of the page, see a few surprises among the sites that were untouched: Pandalized.

R.R. Donnelley paid 57 million dollars for Helium

2011-08-15T12:06:00.000-07:00

When R.R. Donnelley bought Helium in June, no one outside the companies involved knew how much it had paid. However, in RRD's quarterly report for the second quarter, filed on August 3, 2011, RRD disclosed that it paid $57 million (in addition to what it had already invested in Helium before).

That's less than the $100 million or so that Yahoo paid for Associated Content, but a lot more than I would have expected

(more after the jump)

From the quarterly report:

On June 21, 2011, the Company acquired Helium, Inc. (“Helium”), an online community offering publishers, catalogers and other customers stock and custom content, as well as a comprehensive range of editorial solutions. As the Company previously held a 23.7% equity investment in Helium, the purchase price for the remaining equity of Helium was $57.0 million net of cash acquired of $0.1 million and included an amount due from Helium of $1.1 million. The fair value of the Company’s previously held equity investment was $12.8 million ....

The operations of these acquired businesses [Helium and RRD's other recent acquisition, Journalism Online] are complementary to the Company’s existing products and services.... The ability to bundle Helium’s content development solutions with the Company’s complete offering of content delivery resources addresses customers’ needs across the full breadth of the supply chain.

(Hat tip to Chris.)

Demand Media is in good shape after reporting earnings and some new deals

2011-08-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

Demand Media up 17.04 percent after hours
8/9/11 (via Yahoo)

Demand Media reported second-quarter earnings today, and they released a slew of good news:

-- Earnings beat analyst estimates

-- The company renewed and expanded its ad deal with Google for three more years

-- DM bought IndieClick Media Group, an advertising company that targets a young-ish audience, which they will use to place ads on Cracked.com

-- They also bought RSS Graffiti, which has something to do with posting on Facebook.

Looks like this company will be around for a while.

How to get out or stay out of the Demand Studios WEP

2011-08-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

Editing to add 8/8/11: Based on what's being posted on the DS forums, more people are getting reinstated this time around than last time.

Demand Studios just unleashed the Writer Evaluation Program -- DS's second round of writer purges. In its previous incarnation a few months ago, the purge was called the Writer Development Program, but the name was changed to reflect the reality that there wasn't much developing going on.

From what we heard last time, it seems most people who were placed into the program never got their writing privileges restored. At least a few did, though, so it's not impossible. Being put into the program doesn't mean it's preordained that the WEPper will be fired and that the three-article test is just a show trial. There's still a chance, albeit apparently a small one, to get reinstated.

(more after the jump)

Buried in the long thread about the WEP on the DS forums (now up to 41 pages), is a post by a CE giving advice on how people in the program could get a favorable evaluation. I thought the advice was spot on:

Checking some of the articles of writers who've posted they're in the program although they have decent scores ... I see one thing that stands out:

A lot of "encyclopedia"-type How To articles. They start out "Blah blah blah is blah blah blah," and the introductions are loaded up with with descriptive information that doesn't really focus on the task in the title.

If you're writing a story titled "How to Install Circles on Your Roof," too much information about what "circles" are comes across as filler. Most people googling something like "How to Install Circles on Your Roof" already know what "circles" are and will be bored with an article telling them what they already know. If they'd wanted to know what "circles" were, they'd have googled "What Are Circles?"...

Two more pieces of advice (and good luck):

1. Take five minutes after everything else is done to go back and try to liven up your introductions -- especially the lead sentences -- to make them short and snappy and fun and "enticing" to the reader, before submitting.

2. Buy an online AP Stylebook subscription. If you set your subscription on auto-renew, it's only $15/year. The online stylebook is easily searchable; it's quicker and more accurate to consult the real deal than to ask questions here on the forum or search the web, and that will give you more time to make your stories fun to read.

I agree that writing a "snappy" introduction could make a big difference. If the CE reading your introduction is intrigued by the way you start off, then she's already predisposed to like your article and to be more tolerant of any typos and other glitches that follow. But if you bore her at the outset, so that she dreads having to read through the whole thing, then every little mistake or bit of awkwardness in your article may appear to be magnified.

I actually did get a subscription to the online AP soon after the first purge, and it has saved me time, so I agree with that piece of the CE's advice as well.

(Editing to add): I just saw another post by a different editor in a different thread. While the post quoted above focuses on style, this one addresses content. Taken together, they probably cover most of the major pitfalls DS writers should avoid:

In the articles I've edited, I've seen more problems with content than with grammar. I've seen articles that did not answer the title question comprehensively, and/or had factual errors.

My impression is that some writers have failed to fully assimilate the shift DMS is making toward quality. Grammar skills are a part of this, sure -- but CEs can quickly clean up grammatical infelicities. Not so with factual omissions or inaccuracies. The old "content mill" mentality no longer cuts it. Now, the reader has to be able to take what you say right to the bank. This is consistent with the ongoing specialization process, which pairs writers with subjects they have background knowledge in.

Pick titles in areas you know something about, make sure you've answered the title question comprehensively, write authoritatively and triple-check your facts.

NY Times cartoon: "Own Your Own Conent Farm"

2011-07-31T19:07:00.000-07:00

Content sites have now become the target of a NY Times cartoon -- I guess that means they've hit the big time. The cartoon, which imagines content farms as ant farms, is by Brian McFadden (I hadn't heard of him before, but his style reminds me of Tom Tomorrow's).

Here's a piece of it:

See the whole thing here: Own Your Own Content Farm.

July 2011 content-site income

2011-07-31T12:12:00.000-07:00


Happy 1st birthday to the blog (for real this time!) pinkcakebox

Last month, I counted wrong and jumped the gun. Now it's the blog's first birthday (for real). This is a better month for a birthday anyway, because it was my best month for content-site income since I started the blog.

Almost all the income was from Demand Studios. I'm now making $25 per article in several categories there, and that makes a difference.

July earnings:

more after the jump:

Change from last month:

Change from average:

Change from last year:

I made $149 more this month than I made a year ago, when I started the blog. It's not nearly as big an increase as I had hoped, but at least it's going in the right direction. There's been a shift in which sites I've been focusing on -- I made almost twice as much at DS, while dropping to almost nothing at AC and Helium.

Notes:

Demand Media Studios: I had my best month ever at Demand Studios, despite hitting another writing slump and not making my personal goal. At least I'm going in the right direction! Total income rose from $249.17 last month to $464.37 this month. Writing articles for $25 makes a difference, especially considering that until recently, I was making only $15 per article there.

Revenue share for my four articles again hit a new high -- $33.37, up from $29.17 last month. That comes out to an average of $8.34 per article for the month, up from $7.29.

Helium: I didn't make enough to cash out this month. I wrote one new article, my first for the new assignment system, for $3.00. In the 17 days the article was posted, it made 2 cents in revenue share. Total revenue share for the month was $11.64, down from $13.89 last month, for an average of 4 cents per article, down from 5 cents last month.

Associated Content/Yahoo: Didn't write any new articles. Revenue share was $2.94, down from $5.88 last month. That's for 152 articles on AC and 7 article on Yahoo -- for a grand total of 1.8 cents per article. Not good!

Blogging: I haven't been counting blogging income in my content-site spreadsheets because blogging and content-site writing are different. Also, the amount I make from blogging is so low, I was afraid I would get discouraged if I kept track of it! That said, I did get a check this month for $23.03 from Entertainment Earth for affiliate commissions for people buying bobbleheads via my LOST blog.

CloudCrowd -- first day

2011-07-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

Photo: Saperaud

I signed up today for CloudCrowd, a Facebook-based outsourcing site, and I made 19 cents. It's a bit like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, with some mindless tasks, paying a few cents each, that you can do while watching TV, but they also have higher paying assignments (currently up to $23, plus a potential bonus, for writing 800-word business articles) for people who pass their qualifying tests and have high enough "credibility" scores.

More after the jump

I hit an initial snafu when my editing test was wrongly rejected, but I think that's going to be straightened out soon. Keeping my fingers crossed.

It's a bit like a game where you have to get certain scores to unlock certain tasks. It's definitely not income you can count on, and I've seen a lot of complaints about unfair scores and frustrations with the score appeal process, but I think it could be good for filling in between other projects or taking a break from more difficult jobs -- as long as you don't take it too seriously. It's certainly good for instant gratification -- you get paid in one business day. So I should be getting my 19 cents on Monday. ;-)

Signing up is very fast -- you just give them your name and email address. The site is set up as a Facebook ap, so you have to go through Facebook and give them permission to access your Facebook account. That creeped me out, so I set up a new Facebook account to use just for signing into the site.

You can get more info at CloudCrowd, or if you'd like to sign up using my referral link, I'd be thrilled.

Editing to add 7/31/11 I took a writing test today (different from the editing test I took yesterday), and I flunked. The grader's comments were, ironically, riddled with errors -- and they made no sense. Now I'm pissed.

Meanwhile, I posted my editing test on the CloudCrowd forums yesterday. The reviewer of that test flunked me because s/he said that the test passage contained a comma that was unnecessary. Two editors took a look at it on the forums, and they both agreed with me that the comma was not only correct, but required. They both said they thought I should have passed the test. Now I need to wait for an administrator to come by and make an official ruling.

Update 8/1/11 -- I posted the writing test on the forums, and two editors came by to say they would have approved that one as well. The original review was harsh and insulting, though -- and even though I know it was incorrect, it knocked the wind out of my sails. As of now, no staff person has chimed in, and only staff can reverse a test rejection. (The editors who rejected my tests, as well as the editors in the forum who said I should have passed, are all contract workers like myself.)

Update 8/3/11 -- An editor there acknowledged that many of the test reviewers suck -- apparently, this has been an ongoing problem. Also a staff person did come by to one of my threads to say that they were going to be changing their procedures so that people could retake the tests (up to now, you were only able to take a test once). On the positive side, the payment process has been seamless. Every day after I've done some tasks there, they dribble a few pennies into my PayPal account without my having to do anything to request them.

I had been doing some of the 3 cent tasks in an attempt to get my scores up -- and because that was all I could do there without having passed any of the tests and with having a crappy score (every time I flunked one of the tests, my score dropped). The 3-centers were sort of fun in a mindless way -- but I ran into a snafu even with those. For one task, I was supposed to be checking photos on various sites, but -- in what I later found out was an incompatibility with the Chrome browser -- sometimes the photos weren't showing up. So, I got more rejections and more points dropping.

Obviously, this is a very frustrating site. But the instant gratification still appeals to me. And some of the people in the forum were very nice and helpful, and they seemed to know what they were doing (unlike the people who had reviewed my tests). So I'll wait a while longer and see what happens with getting my test results fixed before deciding whether or not to scrap the site altogether.

Update 8/4/11 -- An administrator finally came by and reversed the editing test rejection. I'm now an editor there.

Update 8/7/11 -- They overturned my writing test too. So now I'm an editor and a writer. One final snag, though -- I found out I need to use MS Word for the editing tasks (not sure about the writing tasks) because the track changes feature isn't compatible with OpenOffice. Since I don't have Word, I have to decide whether or not to buy it.

Wondering if I should join HubPages

2011-07-16T08:59:00.000-07:00


mit

I've been thinking, for a long time, of joining HubPages, but something always holds me back.

It's an attractive site. The page layout is one of the best I've seen for a content site. The writing is also a few notches above the norm. Most pages I've seen are well-written and often have helpful advice.

The community is active and friendly. All the articles I've seen have tons of comments on them. I'd have a head start on socializing because I already know a lot of people there from Helium.

A very good thing: writers keep all of the rights to their work.

The pay, though, is not good. HubPages got hit hard by Google Panda.

(more after the jump)

One of the hubbers posted a survey asking fellow hubbers how much they made. She ran the survey twice. The first time was from August 2009 to August 2010 (all pre-Panda) and got 543 responses. The second one ran from August 2010 to the present, so it spans pre- and post-Panda. That one also got a large response -- 479 votes.

Both surveys showed that the majority of people were making less than $10 per month.

Here are the results for the more recent survey (the results for the earlier survey were very similar, and actually showed people making less than they do on the current one):

Amount made per month on HubPages:

55 percent made less than $10
19 percent made between $10 and $50
5 percent made between $50 and $100
9 percent made between $100 and $300
4 percent made between $300 and $500
1 percent made between $500 and $700
1 percent made between $700 and $1000
5 percent made more than $1000

You can see both surveys here (scroll down a little).

So it looks bad as far as the money-making potential goes. I don't always write only for money, though (if I did I wouldn't be blogging!). I might enjoy writing at HubPages for the community feedback, which I'm not really getting anywhere else at the moment.

But I still hesitate. I worry that I may already be spreading myself too thin across too many sites and too many projects and that I have no spare brain cells left to devote to climbing a new learning curve.

If there are any current or former hubbers reading this, how long did it take you to learn the ropes? Do you think the site is still worth joining now, even after Panda?

Demand Media hooking up with TV network?

2011-07-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

The New York Post said that Demand Media and Scripps Network are talking about a possible partnership. Scripps Network owns HGTV, the Food Network, and other cable channels whose subject matter meshes well with Demand's. The two companies also have Rachel Ray in common.

For a second or two, I was thinking it would be cool to write for TV. But then I realized that if the deal does go through, we would almost certainly be writing for the websites of the TV stations, not for the stations themselves.

In any case, I'm taking this as one more sign that Demand Media is the content company most likely to survive the Panda storms.

I wrote my first article in the new Helium assignment system

2011-07-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

I'm a senior writer in Chemistry! Yes I am! / drawing by J.J.

The new Helium system has been around, in one form or another, since December, but except for a few articles for outside publishers, I've been staying away. Today I decided to dip my toe in the water and try one of the much-hyped "assignment system" articles.

More after the jump.

Recently, Helium took first steps towards a long-promised system that would personalize assignments, offering targeted titles to writers based on their past experience writing on the site. It all starts with the topic sub-channels. An automated system assigns "Senior Writer" status to the highest-ranking writers in each sub-channel. The system, in its not-so-infinite wisdom, gave me Senior Writer status in the chemistry channel, based on my having written a single article in that channel four years ago -- an article about how mood rings work, one of those random titles served up by Helium's contests back in the days when I was still entering their contests. Too bad my knowledge of chemistry, such as it is (and it isn't very much) is rustier than an abandoned bicycle in a rain jungle.

Because of my esteemed Senior Writer status in chemistry, I was offered four articles in the new assignment system, each paying three dollars (a good price, sadly, by current Helium standards). And, miracle of miracles, in these days when most Helium writing requires competing for one-writer-takes all "incentive" payments, these senior-writer articles could be claimed by only one person, so I wouldn't have to fight with other writers for the $3 prize.

Three of the four chemistry articles were actually about chemistry, so those were out, but the fourth was about something called the "Chemistry Olympiad." That turned out to be an international competition for high school students. Easy, peasey to write, I thought -- no real chemistry knowledge required.

I decided to take a bare-bones wham-bam-just-the-facts-ma'am approach.

One of the prominent Volunteer/Company Spokespeople on the board has been promoting the idea, whenever someone complains about Helium's low payment rates, that we shouldn't need more than 20 to 30 minutes to write an article.

With that in mind, I set a timer and went to work.

Eighty minutes later, I was finished.

I'm not even going to calculate how much that comes out to in payment per hour. Better not to know!

Why did I do it? Recently, Demand Studios has been berry, berry good to me -- I'm now approved for three separate projects there that each pay $25 per article. Why write for $3?

In part, I wanted to re-experience what it was like to write without stress -- there's little chance that I am going to get perplexing rewrite requests for a Helium article. In part, my brain was playing stupid tricks on me, telling me that I should grab the title because it was an exceptional offer (by Helium standards). In larger part, I was procrastinating on doing something more difficult. Mostly, though, I wanted to put myself back on Helium's radar screen in case the company does come through on its promise to snag a large quantity of higher-paying writing gigs through its new owner's contacts.

Editing to add 7/18/11: It's been four days since I submitted the article, and it's still sitting in limbo, not yet approved for publication. Meanwhile, this year's Chemistry Olympiad ends today -- and any search-engine traffic for the topic is likely to fall off a cliff once the event is over.

Editing to add 7/20/11: It was published today.

Editing to add 9/2/11: The article has now been posted seven weeks, and has made a total of three cents in revenue share.

The Novice's Guide

2011-07-09T23:34:00.000-07:00

This looks like a very new site, as there isn't much content posted there yet. The copyright notice on the bottom of the page says 2009-2011, though, so maybe it is a new incarnation of something else.

They pay a $20 flat fee per article for exclusive rights for articles 1,000 to 1,500 words long (and that is long!).

As the site name suggests, they want articles that give a basic level of information.

There's no indication on the site, at least that I can see, as to who owns or runs it. Could be a kitchen-table business.

(Via Demand Studios forums)

Link: The Novice's Guide

Never mind

2011-07-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

I decided to delete my earlier post about the Helium forum. First off, there is no end to it:

xkcd

Second, I will never win that particular battle.

Third, this.

June 2011 Content Site Income

2011-07-01T04:06:00.000-07:00

Looney Balloon

Happy birthday to the blog! The blog is now one year old.

(Editing 7/16 to add: Oops, I just realized it's not. I counted wrong! Next month will be one year. Well, happy almost birthday, blog!)

June earnings:

more after the jump:

Change from last month:

Change from average:

Change from last year:

My content-site income this June is almost identical to what it was a year ago, when I started this blog. I had hoped it would be much higher by now.

(Editing 7/16 to add: I compared June to July here. Doh! Next month, it should all work out.)

Notes:

Demand Media Studios: I hit a writing slump mid-month and wrote far fewer DS articles this month than last, and my DS income dropped from $406.04 to $249.17. I'm going to try to get back to a slow-but-steady pace, with a small daily quota, as that seemed to work best for me when I was doing it.

A couple of promos during the second half of the month temporarily raised my top pay rate from $18.50 per article to $26.50. A batch done at the end of the month at the promo rate will show up in July's paychecks, giving me a good start for the new month.

Revenue share had dipped last month, but is now trending upward again. For four rev-share articles, I received $29.17, up from last month's $25.04 and close to my all-time record of $31.40. Average rev share per article for the month was a very good $7.29. One of the articles seemed to have risen from the dead, perhaps because of DS's recent purging of user-written content..

Helium: Cashed out once mid-month for $31.04, which included a $10 flat-fee "neighborhood" article and revenue share for six weeks, since I didn't cash out last month. Total revenue share for June was $13.89 for 263 articles, down from $14.57 last month, for an average of 5 cents an article, down from 6 cents from last month.

Associated Content/Yahoo: I wrote one new article for an upfront payment of $15. I received $5.88 in performance payments (down from $8.34 last month). $5.46 was from AC, 40 cents from Yahoo OMG, and one penny each from Yahoo Movies and Yahoo TV. That works out to an average of 13 cents for each OMG article and 4 cents for each AC article.

Constant Content: Sold one article for usage rights for $6.50 net ($10 gross).

Squidoo: It looks like they are sending me a dollar once every four months or so.

The case against content sites

2011-06-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

Even though I am part of the problem, I think the points made by a content-site hater yesterday in an opinion piece posted on the New York Times site do ring true.

My only objection is that she cherry-picks the bad examples. I don't think I've ever written anything that came close to being as bad as the sentences she quotes. What I write on content sites may rarely be earth-shattering, but it's usually at least coherent.

Content-site writing is often terrible -- but not all of it is. (The opinion-piece author does, at least, give a barely-perceptibly favorable nod to the DS-written portions of eHow.)

Related articles (warning -- if you're a content writer who isn't already totally cynical, reading these may be uncomfortable):

(1) AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out and (2) Leaked: AOL's Master Plan.

Idle speculation about the Helium takeover

2011-06-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

Photo: Ghearing family

Helium baked a cake to welcome its new owner, RR Donnelley. Will this be the start of a long, happy marriage, or will Helium regret the day it fell for the tall, handsome company?

more after the jump

I once worked for a small brick-and-mortar start-up company, which was about the same size as Helium. One day, a much larger and more established company bought the small start-up. At first, everyone expected to be working together, but within a few weeks, the big company revealed it was going to shut the small company down and fire everyone who worked there. The big company, it turned out, believed the small company posed a competitive threat to one of its divisions, and it had bought the small company just to make that threat disappear.

I don't think that will happen with Helium and its new owner, RR Donnelley. It's hard to tell exactly what it is that RR Donnelley does (try making some sense of the business jargon on its "about us" page), but from all accounts I've seen, it is mostly involved in the printing business. So it's unlikely that RR D bought Helium because it saw Helium as a threat.

A closer analogy might be Yahoo's purchase of Associated Content. Right after the purchase, many AC writers panicked and rumors flew around saying Yahoo was going to shut the Associated Content site down. That didn't happen though. The AC site is still there.

The outcome of the Yahoo/AC buy-out was that opportunities increased for some writers and decreased for others. Yahoo did start publishing articles by a relatively small number of AC writers on its own sites, and it generally paid more for those articles than writers had been getting on AC. At the same time, payment for articles on the original AC site dwindled to almost nothing, mostly because of reduced traffic after Google's Panda changes.

I guess the fate of Helium writers depends on why RR D bought Helium and what it intends to do with it. Helium's staff have been dropping hints for quite a while that they were drumming up business with offline print publishers. If that's true, I wonder how it's going to work out, considering that so many Helium articles are written at a barely-literate level. Maybe there will be a Yahoo-like splitting of the writers, with a minority getting picked for new projects and the rest being left out in the cold.

However this works out, one thing seems likely -- the pay for writers will remain low. In every press release, including the one RR Donnelley issued this week, Helium content is proudly described as "cost-effective" -- that is, cheap. That's one aspect of Helium's business that is unlikely to change, no matter what else may happen.

RR Donnelley got a scathing review on Fool.com

2011-06-21T17:20:00.000-07:00

graphic by Pixman

Investing site Fool.com gave a big thumbs down to Helium's new parent company, RR Donnelley, in an article a few weeks ago. The article was part of a series of articles on whether corporate CEOs were overpaid, given the companies' performance. In this case, The Fool said yes:

R.R. Donnelley (Nasdaq: RRD ) is a venerated name, founded all the way back during the Civil War. However, its ability to thrive more than a century later looks increasingly in doubt.

Ouch.

The article continues (after the jump):

This Chicago-based concern provides printing services to businesses. Although our culture may never completely eradicate the desire to have some types of physically printed materials on hand, the digital age's transition to electronic delivery of documents, information, and entertainment has pared down our culture's paper trail, taking a toll on R.R. Donnelley's core business...

The business isn't exactly thriving, but the CEO is ...

President and CEO Thomas Quinlan's base salary was $1 million in 2010 ... His total compensation in 2010 was valued at $6.9 million ...

R.R. Donnelley last reported a meaningful annual sales increase in 2007, when it grew revenue by 24.4%. Although the company managed to generate $1.06 in earnings per share last year, that sum followed several years of running losses....

Earlier this month, R.R. Donnelley's debt grade was downgraded to junk status ...

This is a doddering business, not a beloved old relative. Despite its dubious future, the company seems determined to enrich its CEO, however poorly its stock performs...

I've been reading the Fool.com on and off for a long time, since the mid-90s, before the original dot-com bubble burst. The site isn't always correct in its opinions, but the author of this column, Alyce Lomax, has a good track record at the top of the site's leaderboard for its "up and coming analysts," beating the next person on the board by a wide margin. She seems to know her stuff, and if she thinks the company is struggling, I'm inclined to believe it.

Bottom line: RR D doesn't sound like the kind of company that will throw a lot of money in the writers' direction. Companies that aren't doing well try to cut back on expenses where they can -- and Helium's writers make an easy target.

To be fair, I should mention that Helium's CEO wrote tonight on the Helium forum, "With this acquisition, Helium now has access to an army of salespeople (800 strong!) who understand the value Helium’s writers bring to their clients. This army interacts with 96 percent of the Fortune 1,000 – and I can tell you, most of them need content!"

We'll see.

Helium -- sold!

2011-06-21T15:30:00.000-07:00

Printing company RR Donnelley has bought Helium.

The news was announced on the Helium forums, the Helium blog, and in a press release.

What does it mean for us writers? Anyone have any guesses? And what about the 10 million dollars? Was RR Donnelley the mystery investor that put in the 10 million a few weeks ago? Maybe it was like a dowry or a hope chest, something to get the bride Helium plumped up, rouged, and ready for the wedding to its long-time suitor, RR.

One more turn in the content-site soap opera.

Any brave souls who want to invest their hard-earned pennies in Helium now have a chance to do so, at least indirectly, as the new parent company is publicly traded on Nasdaq under the symbol RRD.

Here's the press release:

RR Donnelley Expands Content Creation Through Delivery Capabilities With Acquisition of Helium, World's Largest Writing Community

Online Site Provides Enhanced Model for Content Used in Digital and Printed Communications

CHICAGO, Jun 21, 2011 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) -- R. R. Donnelley Sons Company announced that it has acquired Andover, MA based Helium, a company in which it took an equity position in September 2009. Helium ( www.helium.com ) is the world's largest writing community and social publishing platform, serving publishers and other content managers with cost-effective, premium local and lifestyle editorial content. Its freelance Marketplace enables publishers and others to access and commission content used in books, websites, catalogs, newspapers, magazines and other communications.

More after the jump:

"This is a superb addition to our suite of content creation, management and delivery services," said Thomas J. Quinlan III, RR Donnelley's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Our previous investment in Helium gave us the opportunity to demonstrate its fit with our global offering. In combination with our premedia capabilities Helium expands our content creation resources to enable us to offer end-to-end services to publishers and other customers. We believe that no other provider is capable of packaging an offer that so broadly encompasses each phase of content management, from inception to delivery."

Helium's online community offers publishers, catalogers and other customers stock and custom content as well as a comprehensive range of editorial solutions.

"Since taking a position in Helium we have had an opportunity to expose this content development service to a broad range of publishing, multi-channel retailing and other customers," said John Paloian, the company's Chief Operating Officer. "The ability to bundle solutions such as Helium's with our complete offering of content delivery resources distinguishes RR Donnelley in a unique way. It allows us to address our customers' needs across the full breadth of the supply chain."

Recent acquisitions Journalism Online, 8touches and Nimblefish join with Helium in accelerating RR Donnelley's ability to provide services and resources beyond its traditional scope.

"We are uniquely positioned to help publishers and other customers originate content, deliver it through a variety of media and even enact systems that increase revenue by allowing online publications to charge for access to selected content on their websites," concluded Quinlan.

About RR Donnelley

RR Donnelley is a global provider of integrated communications. Founded more than 146 years ago, the company works collaboratively with more than 60,000 customers worldwide to develop custom communications solutions that reduce costs, enhance ROI and ensure compliance. Drawing on a range of proprietary and commercially available digital and conventional technologies deployed across four continents, the company employs a suite of leading Internet based capabilities and other resources to provide premedia, printing, logistics and business process outsourcing products and services to leading clients in virtually every private and public sector.

Webanswers makes it easier to get paid

2011-06-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

When I first signed up with Webanswers, you had to answer 200 questions (or get 10 "awarded" answers, which turned out to be almost impossible) before you could sign up to get paid via Adsense. I gave up on the site after writing 30 answers. I recently found out the company changed the rules and are now requiring only 10 answers before they start to pay. So I went ahead and gave them my Adsense number.

I'll see how it goes. I doubt I will be answering any questions there for a while -- I have a lot of other priorities on my writing plate at the moment -- but if any pennies trickle in from my old answers, I may give the site a closer look.

Applying for Writer Access

2011-06-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

Image via Paulding Cty

I heard about this one on the Demand Studio forums. It sounds similar to Textbroker -- you get assigned a "level" and can then claim assignments based on that level. The assignments come from various clients -- with Writer Access acting as a kind of broker -- and the pay rates vary as well. Writers get 70% of what the clients pay.

I'm still looking for a replacement for the high-paying projects I was doing over a year ago at the old Helium Marketplace and am hoping this might help fill in that gap.

From the discussion on the DS forums, it sounds like you start off at Writer Access with low-paying assignments, doing one assignment at a time until you get 10 assignments approved. Clients can put you on "love lists" and your level can go up in various ways, both of which can lead to more frequent and/or higher-paying assignments. Top-paying projects pay in the hundreds or even (rarely!) thousands of dollars.

The opinion on the DS forums is mixed, with some people loving Writer Access, and others not being able to find assignments or running into other snags.

I applied today. It took me about an hour and 20 minutes to read about the site and fill out the application materials. They asked several questions about writing background and asked for a resume and writing sample (I used an already-published article as a sample). I will keep you posted on how it goes.

Note: This is for United States writers only, at least for now.

Link: Writer Access

Update 6/28/11: Still haven't heard back.
Update 7/18/11: Nope, still haven't heard.
Update 7/25/11: Now I heard back. It took five and a half weeks. They said I passed my initial application and asked me to fill out my profile and industry-experience descriptions (mostly already done on the initial application, but I'll go over it again), fill out a W-9 form, and take a writing test which "helps confirm proficiency and Star Level." I'll work on it sometime this week. It may be a good sign that they are asking for so much. I've found that, at least as a general rule, the more hoops you have to jump through to join a site, the better the pay.
Update 7/31/11: I edited my profile and took the writing test. I think I did well on the test, so keeping my fingers crossed on getting a good level.
Update 8/2/11: I forgot to hit the "submit" button on my profile. D'oh!
Update 8/3/11: I'm in, and I got a level 4 out of 5! Yay. Took a look at the site and there are no immediate assignments, but there are 11 "casting calls," which are chances to apply for specific projects. Some of them look interesting. I have a good feeling about this so far and think it could be a nice replacement for Helium's Old Marketplace.
Update 8/3/11 again: They just posted a whole bunch of assignment titles, and I grabbed one. It's a product description for $31. Not bad. That's more than what I'm making for an article at DS, and I think it will be easier to do.

Suite 101 is Dead; Long Live Suite 101

2011-06-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Looks like Suite 101's response to Google's Panda changes was to give up entirely and start a different kind of site! That's awesome. I wonder if the other content sites will eventually do the same.

The announcement Suite101 posted for its writers is after the jump.

Suite101 wrote:

Starting fresh (several months away, development from July 2011)

We are going to start fresh with an entirely new site/platform/thing. This is very much at an early stage: we expect to start devoting time to this by early July.
Much more detailed discussion to come, but I have a few notes to share now:
It will not be primarily geared toward search
Compared with Suite101.com, much more collaborative in nature -- as opposed to static, private, linear
Centered around an active community; community must have power
A range of different tools available for writers, communities, readers
Completely new: platform, mandate, business model, etc all to be defined
Domain: Suite101.com is not completely off the table at this point, if only because almost nothing is. The final decision here will occur as a part of a wider branding exercise. First discover what we want to be, then what to call it.
Beyond this, completely undefined. I'm not trying to be coy. We don't know what it is -- and figuring this out will naturally be our first big task come July. We do have a solid but stratospheric "vision document" that sticks mainly to the points I've mentioned above. It leaves the hard work, as it should, to us -- and to the process of essentially dreaming up and then doing something quite different to what we do today. To my mind, even with its billowing uncertainty, this is far more exciting than even the rapid evolution we had been eyeing earlier.

Interim edition of Suite101.com (from early July 2011)

While we build something else upstream, we will continue to manage and maintain Suite101.com, but in an altered way. We will not be adding new features, or otherwise looking to advance the site; no more development. Editorially, however, we will have a program and some rather ambitious goals for the community. I will be announcing a major editorial reorganization the week of June 6th which will shed light on what comes next.

Via dss

May 2011 income from content sites

2011-05-31T19:25:00.000-07:00

This was my best month for content-site earnings since I started this blog last July. Almost all of the income came from Demand Studios, where I tried to keep a slow but steady pace.

May Earnings:

more after the jump:

Change from last month:

Change from average (July 2010 through April 2011):

Notes:

Associated Content/Yahoo: I did not write any new articles this month, and didn't receive any upfront payments (down from $10 last month). I received $8.34 in performance payments (up from $6.13 last month). The performance payment included $5.21 (up from $2.40 last month) for my three articles on the Yahoo OMG! site and $3.12 (down from $3.71) for my 150 articles on AC. That works out to an average of $1.74 for each OMG article and $0.03 for each AC article.

Demand Media Studios: Received $381.00 in upfronts (up from $151.00 last month). Started doing some eHow Money articles this month, which pay a bit more, but most of this month's increase was due to writing more. Income on my four revenue-share articles was $25.04, down from last month's $31.40, but still a very respectable $6.26 per article for the month.

Helium: For the first time since I started this blog last July, I didn't earn enough at Helium to reach the $25 minimum needed to cash out.

I wrote two new articles there this month. One was a $10 article for the "neighborhood" project, which I'll be paid for next month.

The other, for an outside publisher via the Open Marketplace (now called "Content Source"), was potentially worth $120, but the publisher chose someone else's article, and mine automatically "transitioned" to Helium instead. That gave Helium exclusive rights for a year and, after that, shared usage rights forever.

The article has earned one penny (literally!) in the 11 days it's been posted on Helium, so that was not a good deal for me. It was a great deal for Helium, though. Helium got three new articles for its site for just a few pennies, plus it also received a commission for the article sold to the outside publisher.

In the past, we could see, before writing, how many other people had submitted articles for a particular title. I felt more confident about writing for new publishers when I was only competing against 1 or 2 other writers. In the latest release, though, Helium eliminated our ability to see how many other people were competing on the title until after we submitted.

As for income share, I made $14.57 this month, down from $15.78 last month. With 263 articles, that comes out to an average of $0.06 per article, down a fraction of a penny from last month.

Google gives more detail on Panda

2011-05-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

On the Google blog, they've posted a list of questions to help people "step into Google's mindset" about quality.

No big surprises. I think it really does come down to common sense.

The post is here: More guidance on building high-quality sites

Helium gets 10 million dollar investment; Demand Media cleans house, hires Google guy

2011-05-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

Helium just got a 10 million dollar investment. According to an SEC filing, it's all from a single (unnamed) investor. I'm stunned. Who would invest 10 million in Helium post-Panda? Apologies to any Helium fans who may be reading this, but Helium seems like the epitome of the kind of "mill" that Google has in its sights -- its content is often thin, badly-written, and sometimes wildly inaccurate. Plus the site is clogged with ads that make it almost unreadable, a likely trigger for Google oblivion.

Does someone at Helium have a rich uncle?

Or does the company have something up its sleeve -- has it secretly branched into something more lucrative than content milling? Maybe they've discovered oil under the company parking lot.

Meanwhile, over at the content mill that is most likely to survive, Demand Media is cleaning house. They're pulling all the old user-written eHow articles, either taking them off the site entirely or sending them through their editorial checking process. They're also purging writers, sending Demand Studios writers who are doing poorly on some unnamed metric(s) into probation, where they will have to prove themselves or be given the boot.

They also hired an ex-Google guy. That sounds, on first hearing, like a really smart move, but if I recall correctly, Associated Content had done something similar -- and AC has been banished to Google's basement.

So it's no panacea. All in all, though, I think that Demand Media is the mill that is taking Panda most seriously and is making the changes that are the most likely to work.

April 2011 content site earnings

2011-04-30T10:03:00.001-07:00

This month I received $336.31. It was my second-highest month since I started this blog last July, even though I was out of town this month and not writing for about a week. Part of this was due to being paid for a Helium "custom content" project I had done the previous month, and part due to trying to be more consistent about writing for Demand Studios on a regular basis.

April Earnings:

more after the jump:

Change from last month

Change from average (July 2010 through March 2011)

Notes:

Associated Content/Yahoo: Received $10 in upfronts (down from $30 last month) and $6.13 in performance payments (up from $5.69 last month). The upfront was for my last "featured contributor" assignment. The performance payment included $2.40 for my three articles on the Yahoo OMG! site. I received only $3.71 for the 150 articles on AC itself. Average for the OMG articles = $0.80 per article. Average for the AC articles = $0.02 per article. Quite a difference.

Demand Media Studios: Received $151.00 in upfronts (up from $93.00 last month) and revenue share of $31.40 (up from $24.34 last month). Revenue share has been steadily increasing for over a year, and this month's was again the highest. I still have only four revenue-share articles, and the average revenue share per article for the month was $7.85, up from $6.08 last month, and significantly higher than what I am making in revenue share elsewhere. ($7.85 versus $0.02 for AC articles!). Note: Panda may have kicked in a bit here this month, as the current month's accumulation of revenue share (which I will count in next month's total, as that's when it will be paid) has dropped off somewhat -- though it still is far higher, per article, than what I get at other sites.

Helium: I made $90.00 doing the "special projects" neighborhood articles (same as last month), and $32.00 in an open marketplace sale (for an article about the 2016 election). I made only $15.78 in revenue share (down from $19.32 last month) for my 262 articles. Average revenue share per article was 6 cents, down from 7 cents last month.

Helium's new assignment system disappoints

2011-04-29T09:36:00.000-07:00

Photo by Bruno Girin

Even with my low expectations, I was disappointed. What I most wanted to see were the individual assignments -- and there were NONE. A company rep said they hadn't started giving them out yet.

All the assignments were for groups of two to five writers, with only one writer getting paid an upfront (now "incentive") payment, and the rest getting revenue share only. Since my post-Panda revenue share at Helium averages six cents per article per month, that's not terribly exciting.

The payments, for the "lucky" winner who gets them, were only $2 to $6. There was actually only one $6 article, so most were from $2 to $5.

Some outside-publisher titles were listed at higher prices (up to $60). These were brought over from yesterday's Marketplace list. The new system restricts entries to five per title, which is good, but it doesn't tell you how many people have already submitted -- something that was always shown on the Marketplace list. That may be a deal-breaker for me, as it's risky to compete against four other people. If you compete and "lose," you have to give the article to Helium, giving them perpetual shared rights and (this is new) one-year exclusive rights -- for no payment other than revenue share.

And just to top it off, the deploy of the new system broke most of the formatting on the site, with articles losing their line breaks and displaying as single blocks of text. At least that will be fixed fairly quickly. The rest of it -- the low prices, the need to compete for those low prices, the more-restricted information -- that's unlikely to change.

Helium's new assignment system coming soon

2011-04-28T06:24:00.000-07:00


Will the assignment system soar, or will it, um, tank? Photo of gas tanks (helium on the left) by U. Vainio

Helium's new assignment system will be rolled out tonight or tomorrow. They've basically chucked out their old system altogether and are trying something completely new.

They're going to have three kinds of articles -- (1) revenue share only, (2) revenue share plus upfront payment (which they are now calling "the incentive" in order to make it seem like it's merely an extra bonus, rather than a payment people can rely on), and (3) "content source," which is their new name for what used to be "Marketplace" articles -- that is, custom content requested by outside publishers.

Of the three, I'm mostly interested in the "content source."

I might be interested in some of the upfront -- oops, incentive -- articles, but they've already dropped the prices on those before they even started. Earlier, a company rep had said those would pay up to $10, but now they are saying they will only go up to $6, at least at the outset.

Also, for some of those "incentive payment" articles, we'd have to compete against other writers, with only one writer getting the already-low incentive payment -- and the others having to give up exclusive rights for a year for revenue share only. That's not something I'm interested in doing.

How will this work out? Who will stay and who will go? Will Helium be able to tame the jealousy likely to be unleashed when they give some writers better assignments than others?

I don't really feel invested in Helium much anymore as a writer, but I'm intensely curious to see how these changes play out. I believe that Helium is systematically trying to see how little they can get away with paying writers. There's a bigger question at stake here than what happens on this one site.

Helium rising

2011-04-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

Photo by Mtruch

In this totally unscientific test, Helium articles (at least my Helium articles) are coming up higher in the Google search results.

Last month, when I did a search on my pen name, Helium links came up eighth. Doing the same search today, the Helium links came up third. That's significantly better.

The first two links in the search results today were to this blog, the third was to my Helium articles page, the fourth and fifth were to specific Helium articles (about The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud, the dangers of eating undercooked meat, and jewelry trends), the seventh and eighth were to Twitter, and the ninth and tenth were to LinkedIn.

You can see last month's results here.

These results change from day to day, and sometimes even from minute to minute, so it's hard to know exactly what conclusions to draw -- but it does appear that Helium has been doing something right.

March 2011 content site earnings

2011-03-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

This month, I went from
pennies to dollars / photo

The big news this month is that I won one of Demand Studio's People's Choice awards. There were 15 prizes ranging from $500 to $5,000. I don't want to reveal my DS identity on this blog (since I've been a bit caustic here at times), so I'll just say that I won something that was somewhere in the $500 to $5,000 range.

Needless to say, it was a huge boost to my content-writing income for the month and, indeed, for the whole year.

Coming back down to earth, my content-site earnings this month, without the prize, were $262.35. That's less than last month's $314.21, but very close to my average monthly earnings (since starting this blog) of $263.14.

March Earnings (without the prize):

More after the jump:

Change from last month

Change from average (July 2010 through February 2011)

Notes:

Associated Content/Yahoo: Received $30 in upfronts (up from $28.58 last month) and $5.69 in performance payments (down from $7.08 last month).

Demand Media Studios: Received $93.00 in upfronts (down from $141.00 last month) and revenue share of $24.34 (up from $22.35 last month), the highest revenue share yet. That's for only four articles. Average revenue share per article for the month was $6.08, up from $5.59 last month.

Helium: I made $90.00 doing the "special projects" neighborhood articles (up from $70.00 last month), and $19.32 in revenue share (down from $28.59 last month). That's for 262 articles. Average revenue share per article was only 7 cents, down from 11 cents last month. The drop was probably due to a combination of the Google Panda/Farmer change, some of my seasonal articles about winter fashion dropping off, and a sharp, perhaps Panda-induced drop to my highest-earning article.

What does Google think of me now?

2011-03-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

Google doodle for Saint Patrick's Day
3/17/09 designed by 16-year-old
contest winner Evan O'Sullivan Glynn

What does Google come up with now (post Farmer/Panda upgrade) when I search on my pen name?

First on the list is an article I recently wrote for Yahoo! OMG (via Associated Content): Mick Jagger: What the Rock Legend is Doing.

In the #2 slot is an article I wrote last month for Yahoo! Movies (also via AC): 2011 Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale)

Third is a link to the front page of this blog.

Fourth is a link to a specific page of this blog: Perspective on the Helium Changes.

Fifth is a link to the profile page of my Twitter account.

Sixth and seventh are links to specific tweets.

The eighth and ninth links both go to my Helium profile page.

The tenth link goes to my Helium articles page.

What conclusions can be drawn, if any?

It looks like Google is still tinkering with its algorithm. When I tried this same experiment a couple of weeks ago, soon after the Farmer/Panda change, Twitter was on top, Facebook was close behind, Helium was a little lower than it is today, the Yahoo Movie article wasn't on the first page, but a weird random thing (a directory I had never signed up for) was.

From today's results, it looks like Google is not penalizing articles published on Yahoo, even though I wrote them through the Yahoo! Contributor Network (the new name for Associated Content). On the other hand, the first link to one of my articles on the Associated Content site itself was 15th on the list, ranking below a short comment I had written on a blog.

(Note: My Demand Studio/eHow articles, which I would guess are doing fairly well, do not figure into this experiment because I write them under a different pen name. Same for my most popular blog -- it's under a different name.)

My conclusion is that it's worth writing articles that get published on the Yahoo site, so I'm going to apply to the new featured contributor program.

What is quality?

2011-03-05T08:28:00.000-08:00

Can an algorithm
really judge
writing quality?
Graphic by WVballey

"Quality" has become the Holy Grail for content sites, ever since Google said that quality was what it wants. But what is quality? I think everyone has a general idea of what quality means -- but do we all have the same idea?

Is quality objective or subjective? Is there something concrete that everyone can point to and say, "Aha! We all agree this is high quality"? Do people recognize quality (the way the Supreme Court recognized pornography) by saying "they know it when they see it," or can quality be measured objectively?

I think judgments of quality are subjective, and the judgments vary depending upon people's education, cultural environments, and personal tastes.

Can mathematical formulas really judge quality -- and can mechanical processes create it? Google and the content sites trying to please Google think so, as they are all looking for formulas that will filter content for quality.

They are also using human judges. Google hires human quality-control teams to rate sites, and the content sites are relying more and more on human editors to act as gatekeepers. This being the internet, though, everyone wants to automate the process as much as possible.

For example, Helium's first response (or at least its first public response) to Google's implementation of the Farmer algorithm was to remove the page breaks from articles. Helium's thinking was that since Google said it will penalize shallow articles, removing page breaks will make articles longer and, Helium reasoned, longer articles are, or at least seem to be, more in-depth.

But, of course, longer articles are not necessarily any deeper than shorter articles. If you take a three-page shallow article and remove the page breaks, then you will have a one-page shallow article.

This has nothing to do with real quality. That's the problem. I've never seen anything on the Helium forums that encourages writers to even think about higher quality in any significant sense. It's all about more ways of trying to appeal to Google, such as the trick of taking out the page breaks to make articles appear to be deeper. Ironically, it seems that tricks are exactly what Google is trying to penalize now.

Quality writing makes people think, or laugh, or empathize, or learn something new, or see the world in a new way. Quality writing charms the reader with its artful use of language, its perception, its vision, or its wit. There is nothing I've ever seen on Helium that says this should be our goal -- in fact, it's often the opposite. Articles that stray too far from a rigid formula by using humor, personal experience, or even metaphor are likely to be branded "unprofessional" and deleted from the site.

The guiding principle on the site seems to be that people don't want to read on the internet, they only want to skim, so writers need to serve up small, easily digestible factoids in simple language for the distracted reader. Whether or not that those assumptions about internet surfers are true (and, to be fair, they did not originate at Helium), writing for an audience presumed to be non-readers can not produce high-quality writing. It's a self-canceling assumption. Quality writing needs quality, engaged readers. If you assume such readers don't even exist, you won't try to reach them, and the game will already be lost.

Editing 3/7/11 to add: In an interview with Wired, Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal talked about how they translated their intuitive sense of quality into an algorithm. They didn't go into specific detail, though, as they said they couldn't reveal too much because the algorithm can be gamed.

February 2011 content site earnings

2011-02-28T21:44:00.000-08:00

I did better this month than last month.

February earnings

Change from previous month

I made more on each content site than I did last month, and made $191.78 more overall.

Change from the average (since I started this blog):

I also made more on each site than my previous average.

Notes:

Associated Content: Received $28.58 in upfronts (up from $13.25 last month) and $7.08 in performance payments (down from $9.49 last month).

Constant Content: Sold one article for "usage rights" two times, at $7.80 net ($12.00 gross) each time.

Demand Media Studios: Received $141.00 in upfronts (up from $45.00 last month) and revenue share of $22.35 for four articles (up from $19.29 last month). That's the highest revenue share I've gotten so far. Average revenue share per article for the month was $5.59, up from $4.82 last month.

Helium: I made $70.00 doing the "special projects" neighborhood articles, and $28.59 in revenue share (down from $35.40 the previous month). Average revenue share per article was 11 cents, down from 14 cents last month.

Squidoo: Ever post something online and forget about it, only to be reminded years later that it still exists? I created a Squidoo page on freelance greeting-card writing several years ago, as a place to put all the links I had collected. I thought the links might be useful for new greeting-card writers, but no one seemed particularly interested at the time, so I stopped working on the page. I didn't think much about it until Squidoo sent me a dollar a few months ago. In February, they sent me another dollar. Not sure what is going on, but I'll take it.

End of the line for content sites?

2011-02-28T18:17:00.000-08:00

End of the Line / Quinn Anya

A few days after Google's anti-farming algorithm change, the results are coming in, and it doesn't look good for the content sites. I expect Google to make more tweaks, maybe unannounced, and the traffic stats will probably bounce up and down for a while. Overall, though, I think this is the beginning of the end of the content sites as we know them today. The massive denial I'm seeing in discussions on content-writer forums only confirms it.

I'm guessing that the content sites will do one of three things:

1. Encourage members to aggressively spam Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites, in a frantic attempt to make up lost traffic.

2. Become more selective about who can write. Require real subject-matter expertise -- credentials and/or experience. This is the direction that Demand Media seems to be heading. To see if it works, keep an eye on how about.com -- which adopted this strategy a long time ago -- fares under Google's new system. The big question here is whether the sites can attract experts while still paying low prices.

3. Back off of claims that people can make a living writing for their sites, and cultivate hobby writers instead. Either stop paying people altogether, or make the payment more like a token prize.

Whether this could work depends on whether the sites can figure out how to hook into that hobbyist energy. Wikipedia does it, but Wikipedia contributors see themselves as helping build something important. Will writers feel the same way about random for-profit content sites?

Maybe the trick would be for the sites to make participating more like a game. They would have to do something to make posting on their sites better than simply posting on one's own blog, if they do decide to stop paying. Maybe Helium can figure it out -- they've already got a small army of volunteer "managers" doing administrative work for the company, without pay, a feat that would have made Tom Sawyer proud.

Google unleashes its anti-"content farm" algorithm

2011-02-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

No farms / USDA

Google made the long-awaited tweak to its algorithm on Wednesday or Thursday of this week. Here's what Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer (and, usually, the public face of the anti-content-farm brigade), wrote on the official Google blog on Thursday:

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Full post here: Finding more high-quality sites in search.

For whatever it's worth, Demand Media Studios is claiming that it wasn't affected by the change. And, indeed, I am still seeing a lot of eHow links high up on the Google results pages -- whether as many as before, I don't know. Meanwhile, anecdotal reports from writers on various revenue share sites are that page views are way down. Hubpages seems to have been hit particularly hard -- or maybe it's just that its writers are the most vocal. In any case, I think it might take a few more days for things to settle down enough so that we can tell what is actually going on.

On the Helium forums, a lot of people are saying that Google is only going after writers who post their articles on multiple sites. I think this is a misreading of Google's call for "original content" that ignores what Google is clearly saying about "research, in-depth reports, [and] thoughtful analysis."

Giving credit where credit is due -- eHow saves the day (or at least the jar of tomato sauce)

2011-02-23T11:30:00.000-08:00

All your insides
are belong
to us

Bashing eHow is a popular spectator sport, and I've indulged in it myself now and then. But today, eHow came through for me.

I had a jar of spaghetti sauce -- mushroom and garlic -- and it looked so good. But I couldn't get the damned thing open. Tried all my usual tricks, including using a special grippy rubber mat made especially for opening jars, but no luck. It wasn't behaving like a usual stuck jar lid either. The lid was moving around in circles, but it just wasn't coming off.

I was almost resigned to throwing the jar away, but I thought I'd try to find some help online first. The first couple of sites I tried didn't help, but the eHow article gave me the answer -- use a bottle opener upside down, with the point of the triangular hole-punching thingie underneath the lip of the lid.

And voila -- an opened jar of spaghetti sauce (less about a third that ended up on the kitchen counter).

Perhaps this would be obvious to everyone but me. After all, one of the criticisms of eHow is that it is written for idiots. But, in this case, I was exactly the idiot that it was written for!

I can't tell you how happy I am to have triumphed over the Barilla jar. And to the extent that eHow does help people get past life's little (but hugely annoying) frustrations, it is doing a good service -- and I hope that Google leaves at least the most useful articles alone.

Has Helium lowered the rate paid for Publishers Marketplace articles?

2011-02-17T09:12:00.000-08:00

I noticed a few weeks ago that a publisher who had bought two articles from me in the past through the Helium Publishers' Marketplace (aka "old Marketplace") had posted a Marketplace request for another, similar article -- but offering a lower rate of pay.

I thought maybe it was a typo, or maybe the publisher was tightening its belt. I was unable to get an answer about what was going on, so I ended up not writing anything for the new article request.

Then yesterday, I was planning on writing an article, on a subject I enjoy writing about, for a different publisher who had also bought my work in the past. Then I noticed that this publisher was also offering a lower rate than before.

It seemed unlikely this would be a coincidence, as the publishers' pay rates had always been stable in the past, as far as I'm aware.

I did some calculations and it looks as if Helium has increased the cut that it takes from the articles from 20 percent to 30 percent.

A 30 percent cut is not terrible -- Constant Content takes 35, and I'm satisfied with that -- but it seems sneaky that Helium would increase its take without saying anything.

It doesn't make sense to me why they would do this. Their Publisher Marketplace is low volume. If they take a few dollars more on each article, that will probably only add up to a few hundred dollars a month -- a drop in the bucket for a company Helium's size. They could probably save as much if they turned off the lights a few minutes early each evening.

I was going to do the article anyway yesterday, but then I lost motivation and couldn't push myself enough to get it done. I think the wall I ran into was resentment. I've done a good job on the Publisher Marketplace articles in the past, and I think I played a part in helping Helium to retain publishers. Why would Helium want to risk losing its writers who had done good work for them and helped them retain business, just for the sake of being able to nickel and dime them?

The pay for these articles is not bad, by content-site standards, even after the increased cut. But it's a basic principle of psychology that it's not the absolute amount of anything that matters, but whether it's going up or down.

If I'm not doing Helium ("new") Marketplace, and I'm not doing "regular" articles, and if now I'm not doing Publisher Marketplace articles (which were always my main interest at Helium), there's nothing left except for the special-project "neighborhood" articles that I have been doing lately, and I can't seem to do those fast enough to justify the time.

In the unlikely chance that anyone from Helium headquarters reads this, I may be burning my bridges -- probably not a good idea as I'd like to reserve the option to change my mind. But what Helium is doing, on so many fronts, seems so unfriendly to writers -- and so inexplicably so -- that perhaps that would be for the best.

Google's site-blocking extension for Chrome

2011-02-17T08:05:00.000-08:00

Photo by Stan Shebs

A few days ago, Matt Cutts, head spam-zapper for Google, announced that the new Chrome extension was available:

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

You can download the extension and start blocking sites now.

More: Matt Cutts' 2/14/11 post on official Google blog.

The New York Times "Bits" blog has a good article about this:

When critics refer to content farms, they generally mean sites like eHow and Associated Content from Yahoo that publish articles based on what people search for on Google. The articles, they say, provide questionably useful information (so questionable that they inspired a satirical blog, which Google winked at in its blog post.)

In a recent interview, before Monday’s announcement, Mr. Cutts said Google tries to determine whether a user would be unhappy if she landed on a certain page after doing a search, and is working on algorithms to push content farms lower in results. The new extension directly asks users to tell Google which sites they find to be not worth their time.

More: NYT: Google Asks Users to Weigh In on Content Farms.

January 2011 content site earnings

2011-02-02T19:59:00.000-08:00

January was a not a good month for me for content-site earnings -- it was the worst month, in fact, since I started this blog in July, 2010. I was burnt out on writing and didn't do very much. I got a second wind at the end of the month, though, so (knock on wood) the numbers in next month's earnings post may be better.

January earnings

Change from previous month

Lots of red here. December's Helium earnings were actually for two months (due to a change in the payment schedule), so the difference may not be quite as bad as it looks:

Change from the average (since I started this blog):

More red, alas.

Notes:

Associated Content: Received $13.25 in upfronts (down from $30.00 last month) and $9.49 (down from $25.88) in performance payments.

Constant Content: No income from Constant Content this month.

Demand Media Studios: Received $45.00 in fixed-fee upfronts (down from $60.00). In the one bright spot in this month's earnings stats, my revenue share was $19.29 (for only 4 articles!), the highest it has ever been since I started at DS. (It went up from $14.10 last month, with an average per article per month of $4.82, up from $3.52).

The DS revenue share has gone way up this past year. A year ago, the monthly revenue share was only $3.10 (for 3 articles), and then it dipped even lower before starting to soar. If you've been following this blog, you know I've usually skeptical of content-site claims, but the DS revenue share has exceeded my expectations -- and it has far surpassed what I would have received had I sold the articles at the fixed-fee rate.

Helium: Compiling the numbers for Helium has become very simple this month, because 100% of the $35.40 I received was for revenue share (for 262 articles). No upfronts, no bonuses, no new or old Marketplace sales, no stock content. Just pure passive income. The revenue share per article per month comes out to 14 cents (down from 16 cents last month). Fourteen cents a month is not very good. The Demand Studios average per-article revenue share this month was a rather astonishing 34 times higher than Helium's. (Edited 2/15/11 after correcting calculation for previous month's rev share.)

Helium editor goes to the White House!

2011-02-02T18:54:00.000-08:00

I've been critical of Helium on this blog, but today I have some very good news. Janice Brand, who presides over Helium's Marketplace, was invited to the White House as one of only 26 editors invited to the first ever Online Women's Summit. They had a full day of talks with White House officials -- and, get this, Obama himself even dropped by to shake everyone's hand.

How exciting!

From Helium's official blog (which has more details and a picture), via @heliumVP

Google made a move, but the content sites are safe (at least for now)

2011-01-28T15:02:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts, the search-quality guy from Google who posted the now infamous promise to crack down on "content farms" last week, announced that Google made a change to its algorithm today.

It's a small change, which Cutts said affects "less than half a percent of search results ... enough that someone might really notice."

Experiment:

Yesterday, as part of a forum discussion on this topic, I had googled the phrase "how to cure an ingrown toenail" (without quotation marks). Most of the top results were from content sites.

I googled the same phrase now, after the Google algorithm had been tweaked -- and I got essentially the same results.

So whatever Google did today, it did not eliminate content sites from the top of the search-engine results.

Does that mean content sites are in the clear? That depends on what, if anything, Google does next to curb the problems mentioned in Cutts' earlier post.

What Google said:

Here's what Matt Cutts wrote on his blog today:

I just wanted to give a quick update on one thing I mentioned in my search engine spam post.

My post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content....

This does not seem to have to do with content sites, which usually post original, though often shallow content. Does this mean that Cutts was never going after content sites in the first place? If so, what, exactly, did he mean by "content farms"? Or is it that Google is first going after the worst of the spammers, and then working its way up the food chain, with the content sites to be dealt with later?

Cutts does mention that they were evaluating "multiple changes," so it sounds as if they are not done yet.

For the moment, at least, the content sites seemed to have dodged a bullet. I still think that content-site writers should proceed with caution, because we don't know what is ahead.

Demand Media IPO raises 34.5 percent more than expected!

2011-01-25T16:41:00.000-08:00

The Demand Media IPO took place today (Tuesday, January 25, 2011) and took in an astonishing 34.5 percent more than expected. According to Reuters, Demand Media sold 8.9 million shares at $17 each, for a total of $151.3 million. The company was expected to sell 7.5 million shares and had announced the price per share would be $14 to $16.

Will any of this extra money trickle down, somehow, to writers? One can hope, but I'm not exactly holding my breath.

Editing to add: The Tuesday sales were to institutional investors. Share trading will open to the public on Wednesday under the ticker symbol DMD.

Yahoo stock fell 4 percent today

2011-01-25T14:16:00.000-08:00

From Barron's Tech Trader Daily:

Shares of Yahoo! (YHOO) are down 59 cents, or 4%, at $15.43 after the company this afternoon reported Q4 revenue and profit ahead of analysts’ estimates, but forecast the current quarter’s revenue well below expectations....

For the current quarter, the company sees revenue in a range of $1.02 billion to $1.08 billion; analysts have been modeling $1.13 billion.

CEO Carol Bartz remarked, “We just completed a very encouraging quarter and year for Yahoo!, where we saw our plans to turn around the company gain momentum." ...

It's hard to wrap my brain around the idea of a billion dollars in revenue.

What I'm guessing this means for AC/Yahoo writers is that the company will be under pressure to do better financially, and that could mean it will look for ways to pay AC/Yahoo writers less -- perhaps by relying on incentives that are more about "fun" and less about cash.

Demand Media IPO on Wednesday?

2011-01-25T11:35:00.000-08:00

Hold on to your wallet!
Photo by MpegMan / Wikimedia

Rumor has it that the controversial Demand Media IPO will be tomorrow!

Expect Demand Media Studios, and perhaps the content-site world in general, to be in the media spotlight for the next few days.

Editing to add: Sales to institutional investors took place on Tuesday. Share trading will open to the public on Wednesday on the NYSE. The company's ticker symbol is DMD.

Google cracking down on content sites? An official Google blog post seems to say "yes"

2011-01-21T13:23:00.000-08:00

Photo by Karora / Wikimedia

Google is the lifeblood of content sites. The sites get most of their traffic from Google searches and have developed elaborate -- and highly successful -- strategies for snagging the coveted spots near the top of the search-result pages.

That puts a lot of power in Google's hands. If Google decided it wanted content-site articles off of its top search-result pages, it could choke off most of the traffic it sends to the sites.

For a while, there have been rumors that Google was going to do exactly that. Now, the rumors seem to be confirmed. In a post today on the official Google blog, Principal Engineer Matt Cutts wrote:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.

The critical question is what, exactly, does Google consider "shallow" and "low-quality" content? Low quality is relative -- for any bad article that exists, there is always another, somewhere, that is worse. Where is Google drawing the line?

It's possible that Google may only be going after sites that are far worse than the content sites. But Cutts's use of the term "content farms" seems significant. The term is commonly used to refer to sites that buy large quantities of material from freelance writers for prices far less than those traditionally paid to professional journalists -- exactly the kind of content sites we've been discussing on this blog.

If Google is targeting content sites, there's another crucial question for writers: will Google be filtering out the sites as a whole, or will it be filtering articles individually? Critics who dismiss all content-site articles as dreck are wrong. The quality varies. Will even good articles posted on suspect sites be penalized? That remains unknown.

What this all means for content-site writers, I think, is that we need to be cautious. Content sites love to dangle in front of writers rosy visions of the future, especially visions of revenue share payments that will last forever and fund retirements. Hang out in any content-site forum, and you will hear "the sky's the limit," and " how much you make is entirely up to you and how much work you want to put in." The reality is that a handful of people at Google changing some numbers and symbols in a formula could be enough to make the whole content-site industry go "poof."

My advice? Enjoy the content sites for now, but don't bet the whole farm on an uncertain future.

Ask a question

2011-01-17T11:46:00.000-08:00

1910 poster / Wikipedia

If you have any questions about content-site writing, ask them in the comment section below, and I and/or my clever readers will do our best to conjure up an answer.

Tip for getting up-front payments at AC/Yahoo

2011-01-17T09:47:00.000-08:00

Tip: For the best chance of getting an article accepted for upfront payment from AC/Yahoo, make sure that the topic is not something that will soon be out of date.

I recently submitted an article about a future event, but by the time the article was reviewed, the event had already happened. The article was rejected.

It took 19 days for the article to be reviewed, an unusually long time for AC. There were some atypical glitches along the way, which I won't go into here, but I also realize now that I underestimated what the review time would have been even under the best of circumstances.

Except for the featured contributor articles, I hadn't submitted anything to AC/Yahoo for upfront payment for over a year and a half, so I was rusty in working with the process. My featured contributor articles had been approved very quickly, usually within a few days. I thought the same would be the case for the "regular" articles -- but now, I realize, it's not. So a longer review time has to be taken into account when deciding on article topics.

Here's the message I got from the CM in the rejection letter:

Unfortunately, this subject is too time-sensitive to be relevant long enough to justify Up-front Payment.... In the future, you are encouraged to submit articles like this as Display-Only.... This allows your content to be published while it is still very relevant.

The CM has a good point, and from now on I will avoid submitting articles for upfront payments on topics that will go out of date quickly.

"Display only" is not a bad option. In fact my personal-best record-breaking article for single-day page views (over 12,000 in a day) was submitted "display only" and made about $20.00 in revenue share. "Display only" is also an attractive option because you keep total control of your articles -- you can change them or remove them from AC at any time.

Sometimes, though, it might be easier just to post a time-sensitive article elsewhere. That's what I ended up doing, in the end, with my rejected article, which I put on my personal blog. I was going to have to rewrite it a bit anyway to give an update, and that just seemed easier to do in Blogger than on AC.

Out-of-date articles are not the only ones likely to be rejected for upfront payment. The AC/Yahoo upfront payment guidelines has a complete list. Here are the things to avoid if you want to snag an upfront:

-- Creative writing and (alas!) humor
-- Recipes
-- Opinion
-- Movie, music, television, or video game reviews (except, sometimes, for special assignments or featured contributor articles)
-- Anything too general or too common -- especially on topics that have already been published on AC (use the search box to check)

As for articles, like mine, that will quickly go out of date, the guidelines say that articles are likely to be rejected for upfront payment if

[t]he content has a short shelf life. Some subjects, such as breaking news or sports results, may be hot for a day or two but then don't attract search traffic again. We can typically offer Up-front Payment only for content that will stay relevant for weeks, months, and even years.

So that's my tip of the day: Don't assume that articles will be reviewed quickly. In fact, it's best to factor in the possibility of glitches occurring that may slow the process down. Avoid any topics that might be obsolete by the time the articles are reviewed or shortly after.

Mid-month update on content-site work

2011-01-16T13:46:00.000-08:00

What I've been up to this month so far on the content sites:

Associated Content/Yahoo -- Around the end of December, I felt a burst of new enthusiasm for AC, mostly because a bunch of fellow disgruntled Heliumites were excited about joining AC a/.nd moving their Helium work there. Their excitement was contagious.

I thought that in addition to doing my featured-contributor articles, I would start moving over more of my Helium articles and also start writing new "non-exclusive" articles. I started c.ompiling a list of topics I wanted to write about, and I wrote the first two.

I ran out of steam, though, when I hit a snag. One of the articles that I submitted on December 29 (almost three weeks ago) seems to have fallen into a black hole, after a site editor sent me a question via an email address that didn't accept replies. The article is in limbo now and getting increasingly out of date. I may just pull it in a few days and put it on a blog. (Editing to add --> Update: The article was reviewed and rejected. See my next post for a tip based on what I learned from the experience.)

The transplanted Helium articles are making a bit of money, but I'm not sure if it's enough to make cleaning them up and putting them into AC format worth the time.

I've always felt frustrated by the glitchiness of AC, but just got swept up this time in the ex-Heliumite's enthusiasm. I'm pulling back a bit. Not out -- just back. AC might still be a good place to post articles about things I do around NYC that might have a wide appeal. I also may try putting up some "slideshows" there, as I'm not doing anything with my photographs now anyway.

Constant Content -- Yesterday, I wrote a guest post on Doreen's freelancing blog about Constant Content, as part of a content-site-review project she is doing. Writing that guest post prodded me to get off my duff (or rather to stay on my duff but start moving my fingers) and write a new article for Constant Content, something I have been meaning to do for a while.

I wrote an article about the top 5 free things to do in New York City in February, which I think came out well, if I do say so myself. If it sells, I may do a series of free-in-NY articles, one per month. If it doesn't sell by, say, the end of January (when its shelf life will start to decline), I can change the licenses offered to "usage only" and post it elsewhere.

Right now, Constant Content is the site I'm most enthused about. Whether that continues probably depends on how much and how often I make a sale.

By the way, most of the links to Constant Content (except for the one that goes directly to the NYC article) in the guest post on Doreen's blog and here on this blog are affiliate links. CC has a good affiliate program, where referrers get 5 percent of the gross (not the net) sales price of the articles, which comes out of the company's share of the income, not the writers'.

If you do decide to sign up with Constant Content through one of my affiliate links, I will have a vested interest in seeing you do well -- the more you earn there, the bigger my commission -- so if you join CC, feel free to contact me via email (my address is in the sidebar here, to your right) or via the Constant Content "Contact This Author" button if you have any questions -- or simply to say "hi."

Demand Studios -- I'm still writing for them, but I'm feeling burnt out and have only done three articles so far this month. Of the three articles, two were sent back for rewrites. One rewrite request was reasonable, the other was not. Comparing notes with other DS writers showed me I wasn't alone in getting bizarre requests.

I went to a webinar that DS put on this week about citing sources. The webinar itself was neither terrible nor great, but I enjoyed hearing the presenters' voices in the middle of my writing workday. It made me realize that working alone at home is getting old. As much as I've always liked working by myself, at least in spurts, I think I've taken it too far this time, to an uncomfortable extreme. Enjoying a DS webinar, of all things, made me realize that I must be really craving more human contact when I work than email and forum communication alone can provide. Maybe it is time to go look for a "real" job?

Or maybe I'm blowing this up too much, and it was simply pleasant to hear staffers talk to us directly, human-to-human, instead of being barricaded behind layers of robomails. ;-)

Helium -- If you've been following this blog, you know how I feel about last month's massive changes, but I still have one foot in the door there. I'm doing a few of their special-projects articles (what I used to call "Marketplace assignments," until they opened up yet another branch of Marketplace and made the term too confusing to use). I'm also thinking about entering a contest, as one of the contests has literally no entries right now -- something I've never seen before on the site.

First though, I'll wait to make sure they haven't skipped town. They missed a payday yesterday and gave no explanation -- something that has never happened before, as far as I can remember, in the 4 1/2 years I've been a member there. (Editing to add:) At about 7:00 pm, someone from the company showed up and said they were aware there was a problem. Looks like they are still in business! (Editing again to add:) They paid everyone. Seems to have been a minor glitch. It's odd, though, that they didn't say anything for so long.

Demand Media worth over a billion dollars?

2011-01-12T06:31:00.000-08:00

Swedish rock band Billion Dollar Babies/ Wikimedia

Poor Demand Media can't get no respect from the financial press. A post by the New York Times DealBook blog this morning started off with a dig: "Demand Media, the controversial online content publisher ..."

This morning's news is that DM gave a price range of $14 to $16 per share for its upcoming IPO in an amended filing with the SEC today. DealBook said that at the midpoint, DM would have a market value of about $1.25 billion.

That's a lot of $15 articles!

And yet another new content company: CopyPress

2011-01-10T12:00:00.000-08:00


Photo published by Bain News Service, circa 1910s / Wikimedia

All of a sudden, new content companies are springing up all over. I wonder why. Is it something in the air?

In any case, this is another one that I heard about via the often-useful Demand Studios Sucks forums. According to a post in the DSS thread, CopyPress pays 1 to 4 cents per word. That doesn't sound very good, but according to the same DSS poster, the assignments are easy, and the company has a lot of work right now.

The company's website says:

Every author and editor at CopyPress understands the value of quality content, teamwork and community. A basic understanding and passion for these things is required. If you’ve never created quality content, don’t value teamwork, prefer not to interact with others or can’t tell us the difference between an adjective and noun, this isn’t the company for you.

Apply here: CopyPress careers

Another new content site: "The Content Factory"

2011-01-09T15:24:00.000-08:00

Photo by Chris Murphy / Flickr

Many content sites have been called "content factories," but this small online public-relations company uses that as its actual name.

I heard about them through a blog comment they left yesterday, where they said they were hiring freelancers, and that they "pay more than content houses like Demand Studios."

I took a look around their website. The company started a few months ago, in October 2010. They look legitimate. That's about all I can tell you, but if anyone knows anything more, please share.

They are looking for people to write website landing pages and SEO articles. Their application process is refreshingly direct -- no forms to fill out, just an email "detailing your content writing experience." The information is here: Writers wanted for "The Content Factory."

Another new content site looking for writers: Skyword

2011-01-03T23:43:00.000-08:00

Skyword is a company that I first heard about today (via Demand Studios Sucks). It's founder was also the founder of Gather, so it seems very legit, though the relationship between Skyword and Gather is hard to untangle. It sounds like Skyword was a spin-off of Gather, but is now Gather's owner. In any case, the content-creation part of the business appears to be new, launched just a few weeks ago.

They are taking the Demand Studios' approach of creating articles to answer search queries. They are actively recruiting new writers.

If anyone tries it, I'd love to hear what you think.

You can apply here: Skyword writers

--------------
Photo by David Shankbone

Reminder: Invent-a-buzzword contest deadline is January 2

2011-01-01T09:41:00.000-08:00

The deadline for the invent-a-buzzword contest from the Gotham Writers' Workshop is tomorrow, January 2, 2011. This is an easy contest to enter (if you like playing with words), with a prize of a free 10-week writing course, which you can attend online.

More info.

December 2010 content-site earnings

2011-01-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

There's been lots of drama this month in the content-site world, as Helium announced on December 2 that it was totally changing its system, requiring writers to give up all rights in order to get upfront payments, and throwing the upfront-eligible titles into the formerly high-paying Marketplace system -- all to take effect a mere four days later on December 6!

That ridiculously short notice, it turned out, was deliberate, an attempt to limit the amount of outrage expressed by the writers.

Despite frantic cheerleading from some of the site's most loyal members of the volunteer corps, the new system appears to be a bust with the Helium writer population at large, including the volunteers who quit. Expect to see some tweaks to the system in the new year.

One change I haven't mentioned earlier -- and this is actually a good one for the writers -- is that Helium changed its payment schedule from once a month to twice a month. This benefits Helium as well, because it is leaving the payment minimum of $25 the same, and the twice-a-month payment schedule is likely to motivate writers who used to make more than $25 but less than $50 to write more in order to make both payouts.

The payment change meant that during December, we were actually paid for two months worth of income, as the two payment systems overlapped.

That makes it trickier to report this month's statistics in a way that I can compare them to past months. On December 10, I was paid for income from November 3 to December 3. On December 15 I was paid for income from December 3 to December 14, and on December 31, for income from December 14 to December 30.

I'm going to break that down into two months -- calling them Month 1 and Month 2 -- where Month 1 is for the income generated Nov. 3 to Dec. 3, and Month 2 for the income generated Dec. 3 to Dec. 30.

Here's what the stats look like with all the payments combined, to reflect what I actually received in payment during December:

December earnings (all)

This was the most I've received in a single month since I started this blog, but the total is inflated because it includes two months of Helium income. This is what the stats look like with just the Month 1 Helium income (earnings generated Nov 3 to Dec 3):

And this is with just Month 2 (Helium earnings generated Dec 3 to Dec 30):

This is the change from last month (counting all the Helium income received in December):

This month I'm going to skip the calculations for the change from the average, because this is getting way too complicated. ;-) Suffice it to say that looking at Month 1 income, the total for the month (from all sites) was above the average, but looking at Month 2, it was below.

Notes:

Associated Content: Received $25.88 (up from $6.24 last month) in performance payments. Most of that was from a single article -- Brandy was robbed -- which received over 12,000 page view in a single giddy day (though not, alas, very many after that), earning it $19.83 in November. I also received $30 in up-fronts for doing three featured-contributor articles.

Constant Content: I've been a member there, but mostly inactive, for several years. Recently I recommended the site to a fellow online writer when I saw they had a request which seemed to be right up his alley. He sold two articles right away, and my referral commission, combined with a small payment for usage rights to an old article, was enough to cross the $5 payout threshold.

Demand Media Studios: Although I had planned on writing 30 DS articles this month, I only wrote three! Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans. I still received $60.00 (down from $112.50 last month) in flat-fee payments, due to some payments coming in for articles written the previous month. Revenue share this month (still for only four articles) was $14.10 (down from $16.43 last month). I was afraid that the revenue share might have peaked and was about to start a long decline, but in fact it's gone back up this month. And $14.10 is still a very respectable $3.52 average per article per month.

Helium: Looking at Month 1 (the income generated Nov 3 to Dec 3), I made $182.51 total. Of that, $68.00 was from "old" Marketplace (i.e. sales to outside publishers), $30.00 was in upfront payments (the last of the upfronts!), $3.00 was in upfront bonuses (the last of those too!), and $50.00 was for coming in first place in the Winter Fashion contest -- the first Helium contest where I've won any prize at all since the site's beta-testing days in 2006. I had income share of $31.50, up from $23.59 the previous month, and an average income share per article per month of 12 cents, up from 10 cents the prior month.

If "Month 1" had been a regular stand-alone month, by itself it would have been the highest-earning month I had at Helium since I started this blog (though not since I started at Helium, due to some months where I wrote batches of higher-paying assigned articles for "old" Marketplace). It's ironic that the Helium ax came down just days later, right after I was starting to do well there for the first time on the non-Marketplace side.

Month 2 (the income generated Dec 3 to Dec 30) covers a period when I was no longer actually writing new articles for "regular" Helium. I wrote my last "regular" Helium article on November 16. Since then, the only things I have written at Helium were three articles for "old" Marketplace (for outside publishers). So far, two of those articles (one was an assignment, and one was for the open Marketplace) have sold, while the third is still being considered.

Total income for "Month 2" was $84.07. Of that, $42 was for "old" Marketplace and $5 was for a stock-content sale (ironically written in first person, which the forum mavens repeatedly tell us stock-content-buying publishers don't want). That leaves $37.07 in income share, up from $31.51 from Month 1, with the average per-article-per-month rising 4 cents to 16 cents, the highest ever since I started keeping track in March, 2010. That's good that my income share went up even though I didn't write anything new! I hope the trend continues. Some of the income share came from articles that were seasonal, but over half ($21 for the full month of December) came from a single article that may (knock on wood) have some staying power. (edited 2/15/11 to correct rev share average)

And so ends the strangest month for content-site writing since I started this blog. I wish you all a happy New Year. I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, but I'll try one this year, and resolve to spend more time and energy in 2011 focusing on higher-paying markets for my writing.

How much of your Helium earnings come from revenue share?

2010-12-27T09:53:00.000-08:00

Here's a quick way to find out what percentage of your total Helium income is from revenue share:

On the earnings page, take "total earnings" and subtract "adjustments." Take the answer and subtract "total invite earnings" (if you have any). Take the answer and divide it by "total earnings." That will give you the percentage of your Helium income that comes from revenue share.

Mine is 12.05 percent.

That's not very much.

Some Helium writers made most of their money through upfronts, others through revenue share. In my case, the vast majority of my Helium earnings came from "old" Marketplace (both open Marketplace and assignments). The Marketplace income far exceeded both revenue share and upfronts.

But I liked the upfronts. I found them motivating. I miss them. I haven't written any "new" Marketplace articles, and I haven't written any non-Marketplace articles in over a month. That's the impact of the changes on me, for whatever it's worth.

I suggest everyone do the calculation described above and see what percent of their Helium income comes from revenue share. If you just look at the "outliers" -- the articles that are doing exceptionally well -- it's easy to get a distorted view of the big picture. It's sort of like an optical illusion.

Here, for easy reference:

(Total earnings - adjustments - invite earnings) / total earnings

-----------
Originally posted on the Helium forums.

Deck the Halls with singing animals

2010-12-24T22:58:00.000-08:00

So cute!

Happy holidays!

Brand new content site: The Writers Network

2010-12-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

It's not often that there's a new, major content site on the block, but one has just opened. Called "The Writers Network," and backed by media mega-mogul Barry Diller, it offers writers $10 to $25 per article.

From the site's FAQs:

Q: What kinds of assignments are available?

Our assignments tend to include information for the casual end user – not too technical, but helpful for someone trying to do light research on a topic or find out how to accomplish a task. While we are, currently, publishing Home and Garden topics exclusively, we will be adding Finance, Travel, Parenting and other categories of content in 2011. Assignments are generally 300 to 1000 words in length and pay between $10 and $25 depending on length and complexity.

Sounds similar to Demand Studios.

You'll need a resume and one writing sample to apply. Apply here.

Articles about the site launch: The Observer, Adweek

The end of content sites?

2010-12-23T15:43:00.000-08:00

"Content farms are like an opportunistic infection that has flourished thanks to a disruption of the online ecosystem." So writes Jeff Bercovici, a blogger for the venerable business magazine Forbes, in a scathing post entitled Demand Media’s Accounting Is Even More Bogus Than It Seems. Ouch.

What set him off was new information about what he calls Demand Media's "unorthodox accounting" practices, which involve Demand Media counting the value of articles as extending over a period of years. The question is whether this is legitimate -- whether it's reasonable to assume that articles will keep on earning at the same, or greater, rate for five years after they are first posted, or whether this is a sneaky way to overstate the company's income.

The business/investment community is interested, at the moment, in Demand Media and its accounting practices because of Demand Media's upcoming IPO, but the Forbes blogger's argument goes beyond just this one company. He sees big trouble ahead for the content-site industry as a whole:

Demand does have something to hide. Its presumptions about the future value of its content aren’t just optimistic; they are, most likely, wrong. If anything, the sort of stuff that Demand and other content farms (like Associated Content and Seed, as well as a new one Barry Diller’s IAC recently launched) produce will lose much of its revenue-generating potential over the next few years. That’s because Google is making a concerted effort to reengineer search in a way that gives far more weight to content with a high degree of authority and originality. It recently introduced new metatags that allow publishers to indicate when an article is original rather than a syndicated reproduction. It’s also reportedly investigating ways to signal when website, blog or author is considered expert in its given field.

Read the rest here.

The Forbes post is aimed at potential investors in Demand Media's IPO. But are there any lessons here for content writers, whether at Demand Media Studios or at other sites? A couple of things come to mind:

(1) We should try not to get too complacent. While the Forbes blogger might be right or wrong in his conclusions, there is little doubt that many people are irritated by the mass of content-site links that now dominate Google's front pages. If Google doesn't want to clear out those links, some other search engines will. There are already new search engines popping up that filter out the content sites altogether. So far, they haven't caught on with the public -- but they might.

And since the content sites rely on search-engine traffic for the vast majority of their traffic, anything that lowers the amount of search traffic they get could be fatal.

The spokesfolks for content sites often try to attract and keep writers by talking about how articles will earn revenue share "forever." They encourage people to dream about articles throwing off money indefinitely -- in some cases, the site promoters explicitly compare a portfolio of articles to an interest-bearing bank account or a retirement plan.

I think almost everyone who writes for content sites is at least a bit of a dreamer, but some attention has to be paid to reality. Revenue share is nice as long as it lasts, but it's not like having money in the bank.

(2) Some content-site writers enjoy writing only for one particular site (Helium seems to attract a disproportionate share of these one-site writers, but other sites have their contingents as well). These writers will stay loyal to their site to the bitter end, and if their site goes under, they will go do something else entirely. That will be the end of writing for them.

But for those of us who are writers first and content-site members second, it always helps to remember that old saying, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."

These past few weeks, after Helium sprang its new system on the world, there's been a lot of discussion among disgruntled Helium writers about which other content sites are better.

But moving from one content site to another -- or even spreading out among several content sites -- isn't the answer if the content-site industry as a whole is in danger of going under.

I'm not saying give up content sites altogether. Content sites can be very compelling for reasons that have little to do with money. They are often, quite simply, fun, with points and badges and other game-like incentives to keep people involved. With some exceptions (cough, Demand Studios), they tend to be nurturing towards new writers, and there is a kind of grade inflation where bad writing is considered okay, and okay writing considered brilliant. That's not the best thing for getting a realistic appraisal of your abilities, but it does help build confidence, and it's certainly more pleasant than collecting a drawer full of rejection slips.

But prudent writers who are serious about forging a career or even a long-term hobby would be wise to start looking elsewhere, beyond the content-site universe, even while maintaining their existing content-site ties.

Contest: Invent a new word, and win a writing class

2010-12-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

The Gotham Writers' Workshop, a New York City based private writing school, is having a contest that would be fun for anyone who loves to play with words.

The assignment is to invent a word that you think could become a buzzword in the near future. Write a definition and use it in a sentence. Keep the whole thing under 100 words. That's it!

The prize is a 10-week writing course. They offer a lot of online courses in addition to their local ones, so you don't have to be in New York to attend.

Last summer, they gave several sample classes for free in Bryant Park. I went to two of them -- one on writing humor and the other on plotting in fiction. Both were excellent, and when/if my life ever settles down a bit (and if I end up staying in the area), I think I would like to sign up for one of their complete courses. I've taken a lot of classes/workshops focusing on literary fiction in the past, but these were more oriented towards commercially-viable writing and towards learning specific techniques. I enjoyed the different perspective and, especially in the plotting class, learned much that was useful.

There is no entry fee for the contest. The deadline is January 2, 2011. For more info and to enter: Gotham Workshop winter contest.

Reasons not to write for content sites

2010-12-18T00:23:00.000-08:00

I'm still a content-site and revenue-share junkie, and may be one forever. At the same time, I'm always toying with the idea of kicking the habit. So I like to read well-constructed arguments that tell me why I should quit content sites -- even if I have no immediate intention of acting on the advice. This post by Carson Brackney at FWJ fills the bill: Why you shouldn't write for revenue sharing sites

Where did the $15 articles go?

2010-12-12T00:09:00.000-08:00

Helium has now loaded up the second batch of the "new" Marketplace articles -- 58 pages worth, or close to 600 articles.

During the first round, there was a sprinkling of articles that paid $15/$10 and $8/$5. Now it looks as if those may have been used as loss leaders to lure people in, as the highest price being offered this time around is only $5/$3. If you are just joining in on this story, the first number in each pair refers to the payment given to one writer per title, and the second number refers to the payment given to everyone else whose article written to that title "transitions."

Out of the almost 600 titles, about 40 pay $5/$3 and about 150 pay $3/$1. The rest -- almost 400 titles -- pay $2/$1. And this is for exclusive rights.

In a stunning display of chutzpah, the company, in its official help guide, asserts that its taking exclusive rights is for our benefit. This is an actual quote from the help guide, not a joke:

What is the value to me in giving Helium exclusive rights?

With Helium holding exclusive rights to your article, it should not be published anywhere else on the web, so anyone who reads your article will be reading it from one source. This gives your article a much higher SEO value and should increase your potential ad revenue share. Additionally, exclusivity will make an article more valuable for stock content purchases.

Meanwhile, the first round of new-MP titles has closed, and it's already a couple of days past the stated deadline for the company to make its purchasing decisions. My guess is that they are retooling the whole judging process on the fly.

One thing that remains unknown is how many articles to a title will "transition" and get the lower payment, and how many will be rejected and get nothing. Information given in the forum has been conflicting. It may be the top five articles for each title; or perhaps it is all the articles, no matter how many were submitted to a title, as long as they don't seem to be badly translated from the Martian; or perhaps it depends on some secret-sauce formula based on the SEO value of the titles (not necessarily the articles themselves -- i.e. some titles, considered "good" for SEO purposes, may have a higher proportion of articles accepted).

The Helium reps (long-suffering volunteers) have been mostly leading people to believe that the company will be going with option two -- accepting all articles, as long as they are more or less coherent. So if the judges do end up cutting deeper into the pile and rejecting articles that don't have anything conspicuously wrong with them, writers are going to be pissed. Two things tend to rile up content-site writers more than anything else: payment that is late, and work that they feel has been rejected unfairly.

Update 12/22/10 -- It looks like the company did accept most of the submissions from Rounds 1 and 2 (though it's hard to tell for sure, as people whose work was rejected may be keeping that to themselves). The comapny posted the third round of articles today. This round has 25 pages -- about 250 articles.

There are some $15/$10 articles this time, but only two out of the 250 articles pay that rate. Both ask for car reviews of specific models of cars, which presumably means you would have to own those particular cars, or at least go take a test drive, in order to write the reviews.

The rest of the batch consists of 16 articles that pay $5/$3, 26 articles that pay $3/$1, and about 200 articles that pay $2/$1. The pattern, consistent through all three rounds, seems clear: Most of the articles available pay $2/$1, with only a small sprinkling that pay more.

Despite the low rates, I might actually have written to some of these titles (after all, I was writing for Helium for almost equally low rates before) -- if not for Helium's insistence on taking "exclusive rights." If I gave up exclusive rights for a dollar, I don't think I could look at myself in the mirror.

Beyond content sites

2010-12-11T01:30:00.000-08:00

I just stumbled across a very good list of publishers. (Editing to add 7/26/11: That site took down the list, alas, and replaced it with an article. Just now, I poked around the site and found that the second half of the list only, for publishers whose names begin with L-Z, was still there on another page, at least for now.) Maybe it's time to try to become my own Marketplace, to find my own publishers and come up with my own ideas.

I've been down this road before, and the danger is that I won't get any further than just reading the listings and daydreaming. I'm hitting a dead end, though, with the content sites.

And so I try again.

Ironically, my experiences with the Helium Marketplace have increased my confidence in my ability to write publishable non-fiction. So maybe this time I'll feel encouraged enough to follow through.

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Photo: "Open Road" by Mattox, via sxc.hu.

Onward

2010-12-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

I went on a huge detour where I spent most of the weekend arguing on the Helium forums, and the only thing I accomplished was that I just came back full circle to what I had already decided on Friday -- to take a break from Helium and see what happens.

So here's the plan:

1. Keep up one rating star, which is necessary to keep on earning revenue share. Since I have five rating stars at the moment, I won't have to do much (or any) rating for quite a while.

2. Keep three writings stars, in case I want to write to a Marketplace title. I have four stars and "tenure" (if they haven't done away with that), and it will take a long time for the stars to drift down to three. If tenure still exists, I can drop ten percentage points in my writing score before losing a star.

3. Keep scanning the Marketplace list for "old" Marketplace titles that I might want to do.

4. Maybe consider doing "new" Marketplace articles in the unlikely chance that there is a title where ALL of these conditions exist: [12/11/10 Editing to add: I have to wait and see how this is going to work. Helium changed the rules, apparently, (or did not explain them correctly in the first place) so that more than five articles can now earn "transition" payments for a single title. What I wrote here originally may no longer apply] (a) it pays $15/$10, or higher if they decide to go higher, and (b) it is relatively easy to do, and (c) it is something I won't mind giving up exclusive rights to -- i.e., not really important to me and doesn't call much on personal judgment, and (d) it doesn't have more than five submissions. That would essentially make it a $10 exclusive-rights article with the possibility of a $5 bonus, plus income share -- (equivalent to an AC/Yahoo featured-contributor article). But I doubt all those conditions will ever be satisfied. If an article is easy to write, it is likely to have far more than five submissions, which would turn it into a contest. Unless they raise their prices or post an exceptionally easy title, the amount of work compared to the potential payment in a contest situation where I might get nothing doesn't seem worth it.

5. That's it for now!

The next question is what to do with the time I save by not hanging around Helium so much. I don't really feel like amping up what I do at Demand Media or AC/Yahoo right now. Three things I can think of offhand that I might want to do are (1) Get back to writing greeting card humor, and/or (2) Get back to writing crossword puzzles, and/or (3) Make another attempt at writing for Constant-Content.

I dabbled a bit with Constant-Content, but never made a sustained effort. I just realized if I thought of it as a do-it-yourself version of the Helium Marketplace, it might seem more familiar, and I could apply all my old Helium-MP skills. I might have a clearer focus. I also might feel more as if I were directly filling in the void that leaving Helium created.

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Illustration by Andrzej Gdula via sxc.hu