Since Yahoo Voices is closing, can we republish our articles here?

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   rachel carpenterposted 9 years ago

   Hi! I'm excited to be here!
   
   I'll be honest I currently have a deep, dark foggy cloud surrounding me........... as I learned today that Yahoo Voices is closing. I am devastated and honestly in a complete shock.  I have over 1000 articles published on there.
   
   I will start writing my NEW content here.  (Off all of the content sites I've heard of, this one seems to have great reviews!)  However, can I republish my 1000+ articles here? When Yahoo voices close, they will be DELETED completely, so the only site they will be on is here.
   
   Some people have said that you can, I searched a little through the help area on here but couldn't find the answer. Of course, I'm completely FRAZZLED from this news, and am a little off (okay a LOT off), so forgive me if the answer is in in plain sight.
   
   THANK-YOU for your help and support!!!!

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      wychicposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Yes, but with one small caveat -- I believe that you do still have to wait for them to de-index from the search engines before they can be posted here without the "duplicate" flag. That can take a few weeks after it's deleted from Yahoo, but then they'll be in the clear.
      
      As for reeling from the news....no kidding, me too! I have almost 600 there, but over 200 has been since January. Those big upfronts and assignments got my attention and I kicked it into high gear. A lot of people talked about concerns that the site would close, but it didn't make business sense to me for them to pour all that money into assignments and such just to turn around and close it. Guess business sense is overrated in the business world or something

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      Matthew Meyerposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      When moving content from another site to HubPages, you need to make sure the content is offline for a period of time before you try to publish it on HubPages, otherwise it will be identified as duplicate.
      
      We suggest 10-14 days to be conservative.
      
      This explains the process in more detail.
      http://hubpages.com/faq/#how-to-transfer-content

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2. 90

   rachel carpenterposted 9 years ago

   Well I should have taken two seconds to scan the forums HA.  I just noticed that several writers have said they are moving their articles here so I assume that is a YES. YAY!!!!!! Yippee Skippee, I will move them here

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   Cecelia Meadowsposted 9 years ago

   I would wait until they are deindexed. I write for YCN under my real name as opposed to the pen name I use here. I am very afraid of being flagged for duplicate content so I downloaded my articles and are saving them. I am figuring it will be safe to post them in September. Until then I will focus on new content. Yes, I know I have nothing up yet. I am working on a couple of articles. I am hoping to be very active on here after my daughter starts Kindergarten in the Fall.

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4. 59

   uglypugtradingposted 9 years ago

   I was an active hubber a long time ago and remember when Associated Content was purchased for $100m by Yahoo, then rebranded as Yahoo Voices.
   
   That was only a few years ago, and at the time Hubpages was almost as big as Associated Content, so people were saying that if Associated Content is worth $100m then Hubpages would be worth a similar sum of money. Then panda happened, and ad revenues suffered as mobile traffic grew and laptop/pc traffic declined.
   
   A lot has changed since of course, and Hubpages seems to be getting along ok.
   
   I no longer write, I run a small business, but I've watched developments unfolding ever since the first Panda in 2011.
   
   We've already seen Suite101 and Helium disappear in recent years. Helium was one of the oldest user generated content sites on the web, and Suite101 was a giant. In fact the media used Suite101 as the pin up for content farms and labelled panda as an algorithm to kill it.
   
   Looks like it worked, it is fascinating to observe how the web is evolving, everybody knew that Panda was severe but how many of us that were around between 2009 to 2011 would have expected that the likes of Suite101 and Associated Content would cease to exist by 2014?
   
   Squidoo and Hubpages are the only major user generated / open writing sites that I can think of now - both of those have had to adapt to survive. Once those are gone, whenever that will be, perhaps only a small number of people will know and remember what a revenue sharing writing site is. Once it seemed these sites dominated Google results, and are now a dying breed!
   
   Despite not having contributed to any site for at least two years, maybe more, I am in shock that Associated Content will soon cease to exist - even if it hadn't 'by name' for some time.
   
   It is a shame that these mega corps like Yahoo buy these up, run them into the ground, and then make them extinct. A lot of these old brands have some value and could be useful to somebody.
   
   Last year the founder of Bebo (a famous UK social network from the pre-Facebook days) purchased the domain and branding for £1m, after having sold the site to AOL for £850m in 2008, and is rebuilding and relaunching it.
   
   It is a shame that these big companies can't dispose of assets like this, by passing these businesses back on to people who have a passion for them. It is almost as if they would rather write off the asset entirely than face the potential embarrassment of seeing it succeed again and become worth money once more. But an easy way around this would be for them to retain some equity, so pass on the business but keep a % of the business just in case.
   
   Who knows what the right group of people would be able to do with the Associated Content brand if they possessed the domain, the old logo, a bit of passion and an opinion or two on what they believe was great and not so great about that old site.
   
   Things like this make me a bit sentimental. People build great businesses, take VC investment, sell out for big money, and then these businesses just die. If Hubpages hadn't remained independent then I doubt it would exist now, so I suppose those of you who enjoy this site should be grateful that Panda happened when it did. If it hadn't, then Hubpages would have been bought up by Yahoo, or AOL, or another big business that would have got bored with it and pulled the plug.
   
   It feels a bit like online libricide. They need a word for, a digital equivalent of libricide. Maybe e-libricide.

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      uglypugtradingposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      For all I know there may not be anybody here from 2009 to 2011 and I could be talking to myself

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         classicalgeekposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         I have been writing for revenue-sharing sites since 2007, and I have seen lots of them close. Some of them I will miss; some not so much. But we can always repurpose our content and sell e-books!

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         CMHypnoposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         There's some of us still here!  But big businesses will buy smaller competitors just to strip any useful assets and get rid of the competition.  A bit like when male lions move into a pride and kill any existing cubs so only their offspring survive.
         
         It ain't pretty but we consumers create it by using products and services provided by big corporations.  If we don't like it, we need to walk the walk and seek out smaller, more local companies and providers despite the inconvenience.
         
         For example, there has been a lot of big G bashing on these forums, but nobody seems to mind taking their money when it comes to payout. The only thing we can change is ourselves, so if we want business to change we must start with our own buying and service using behaviours.

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            Lisa HWposted 9 years agoin reply to this

            ...and (going with that lions analogy while leaving the jungle and referring to the barnyard) from the standpoint of individual writers who are interested in posting one type of decent-quality writing or another, things might also be compared to the way female chickens may try to peck to death any of the other ones who are different (and in the case of Internet writers who won't just writer what "everyone else" says everyone else ought to be writing at any given moment).
            
            I dabbled in Internet writing here or there before really settling on Helium and AC in 2006.    At the time the big thing on Helium was kind of contempt for anyone who thought decent use of grammar mattered.  Helium figured out otherwise and went the route of trying to clean up its site that allowed - like - 200-word blurbs.  From there they (and pretty much the rest of the "big writing sites") went with the whole thing about "straight, researched, information that was written in proper grammar (because "nobody reads any more").  (One reason a lot of people thought "nobody reads" is because the Internet wasn't offering good reading material that was reasonably easy to find one way or another, depending on what someone was looking for.)   
            
            Then around the time of Panda 2011 there was the whole, big, push about authorship and (essentially) that doing so would help people in the "eyes" of Google.  People were ALSO told, however (including on this site) that unless someone was already famous and/or a well established nobody cared about what he had to say/write.  Solid writers (of one type of material or another) left this site and went somewhere else). 
            
            When Yahoo bought AC I suppose they figured they had the "just-want-to-write" market down by having Voices for those who didn't want to write "standard articles".  I'd gone through the whole thing at AC to get "approved" for accepting assignments (etc.), but that was for articles.  I decided to try Voices, and because I apparently made the mistake of writing in what appeared to some of their "editors" as an article, rather than a "voice" (in other words, not obvious opinion and instead factual (presented in what THEY SAID they wanted (first person) they wrote back and asked me "what informed" my first-person-experience facts).  I wrote them off.
            
            So now, it looks like "everyone" may be headed back to this site with YCN closing.  This site has both the HP Ad program AND Google as far as ads go.  "Everyone" has said that "nobody" just browses for reading on this site (well, they REALLY don't these days, it appears to me, since there's been the big thing about "straight, researched, articles - only bigger and fancier ones now)   Not everyone who writes/wrote on this site is inclined to come up with the classic "stellar" Hub, so Bubblews has been getting a lot of that writing.  I can kind of guess the different ways Bubblews may evolve eventually.  Writing sites (like jungles and barnyards) are pretty much a matter of a combination of instincts/behavior only with human nature, markets, and good business thrown into the mix).
            
            To complicate things for those writers who don't want to get involved in niche blogs, their own sites , etc. (for one reason or type of writing or another), and for those browsing-readers who want "reading" rather than information there is the thing that Google has been said to penalize people/writing on sites with reputations for being "crappy". 
            
            So I don't know...     Bubblews tells people to "establish a following", but we all know how things are on that site these days and I, personally, don't know what new version of a writing venue could crop up online (if any, other than people's own sites/blogs).  Where's it all going?  Who knows...    I know I've deleted over two hundred Hubs (some were among my best pieces of writing - non-fiction, either creative or informative); so I can't judge by my own traffic and/or scores and/or earnings on here).  All I know is that I have a handful of non-stellar Hubs, a few that I plan to delete when I have the time to dig up some of the images and any other extra's they have, a couple/few that are decent enough material/writing but that haven't been stellar-ized by adding more stuff to them and/or by chopping them up for the purposes of not having any big blocks of text.  (I, personally, won't read long stuff that's been chopped up into short snippets with stuff in-between; and that's one reason I do like to browse the longer pieces of writing on Bubblews.); a Hubber score that has gone from mid-nineties to a hundred down to 84, and an average-Hub score just under 70.  A lot of that is my own doing because I've known that the kind of stuff I want to write pretty much doesn't belong on this site any longer.
            
            All I know is that when I stopped knowing I'd get around the same money (and monthly payment) from using Google-only on here and want, instead, with the HP Ads program for whatever I had on here, it eventually became clear that my deleting a lot of those earlier Hubs had been a big mistake.  For now (while I'm waiting for time and/or urge to write the "whole-big-deal, informative and stellar Hub"), I have the Bubblews account for if/when I ever feel like writing, barely ever do anything on there (browse for stuff that's "real writing/reading", sometimes like it (sometimes be too tired to bother with anything other than reading), and occasionally comment - and I'm picking up a few extra dollars there.  With a couple of hundred pieces of original writing (most of them not old Heliums or Hubs and written there when I was in the mood) I could earn a lot more (whether someone clicks because they like "real writing" or because they think I'll click back - doesn't matter).  On there I don't even make much effort to find connections, though. 
            
            I don't know where it's all going, but for the person who wants a site where he can post the occasional thing in decent-quality grammar, in his own voice and for whatever purpose/reasons he has; and who doesn't want to get involved with pushing his posts by pretending to socialize and be interested in anything other than pushing his own stuff; I pretty much think there's always going to be ads of one sort or another and advertisers (and readers) who want decent quality material (of one sort or another).
            
            For now, as far as the online- writing I do for me and for my own purposes goes, I pick up my spare few dollars from here every now and then and spare few dollars from Bubblews every now and then (and spare few dollars from whatever else I have out there that fits under the category of "writing for me"); but the only thing that stops me from earning more these days is not posting more and/or doing more on either this site or Bubblews; and just sitting down and writing more of whatever I feel like writing in my spare time.
            
            Having decided a long time ago not to worry about "what Google likes", I did my best to establish the heck out of who/what I am as an online writer with the Google profile, and (since my online-writing is a separate thing from "the rest of my life") I've been uncomfortable about how "all-about-me" my profile looks, mainly because I write different types of stuff and felt like I had to explain it all.  In any case, my "authorship" is what is it is, HP is what it is, Bubblews is what it is; and I'm just letting all the chips fall where they may; and figuring that a few dollars here or there, multiplied by however many pieces of writing and/or sites are involved do add up (and without my having to do anything but write what I want to write where or when I want to write it.
            
            I suppose which Contributor Network refugees show up here depends on whether they're from Voices of one of the other parts of the Network.  Either way, I'd like to see HP benefit by getting back more of those people who sincerely cared about the quality of his own writing (regardless of the type of writing); because HP is a good site that has so much more potential than just being a poor copy of About and/or Wikipedia.  (Well, and Bubblews has so much more potential than just being the giant, meaningless-click-fest that it is for that matter.)  (I'm signed up with Squidoo, but I can't even deal with the looks of that site, some of the kinds of stuff that's one there, how things are done, etc. etc.  I like the cleaner, straight-and-to-the-point, more professional, "overall atmosphere/look/approach" on HP..)
            
            In meantime, I'm still figuring out what to do about the pen name I established back in 2006, when, as a writer, I was too embarrassed to have my real name associated with Helium (as it was back then), and I didn't want any potential employers/clients looking up my name and finding 500-plus pieces of my spare-time writing on Helium.         (Oh, what a tangled Web we weave even when we've never been trying deceive.     )

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         wychicposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         Yep, we're still here . I started on my first writing site (Epinions) in 2003. The second, I think, was in 2005, then went full-time freelancer in 2007. The sad thing about those sites shutting down is it really is about the money. In all likelihood, they couldn't sell Voices for the same price they bought AC, so it makes better business sense to shut down and take a tax deduction at the amount of its last valuation. I'm sad to see it go, but at least they have the decency to let us take our own content, and give us a notice -- Epinions shut the doors and cut off our money in one fell blow, then informed us that they will continue displaying our content. We're free to repost it elsewhere, of course, which is about useless with today's algorithms.

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      Marisa Wrightposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      That wouldn't surprise me.  Back in 2011 when the first Panda was launched, Google said it was 'declaring war on content farms'.   Everyone assumed they meant spammy blogs full of spun content, but Matt Cutts made it pretty clear he considered all revenue-sharing sites were content farms.   So I'm not at all surprised so many of them have struggled to survive.

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         TIMETRAVELER2posted 9 years agoin reply to this

         I think that many who wrote for YC will find it difficult to bring their articles over here and meet the
         Quality Assessment guidelines here at HP.
         
         I have written for both, and the formats are totally different.
         
         Furthermore, I do hope that those who come here do not bring lower level articles with them that downgrade HP, now that it is just starting to gain more credibility on the web.

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   Cecelia Meadowsposted 9 years ago

   I first started writing in 2007 for Suite 101 and Associated Content, and sometimes for Demand Studios. I remember the days when writing for revenue sharing sites was a good way to get your name out there and earn some extra money. I made decent money with Suite for a while as well as with Associated Content and miss the way things were before Panda ruined everything. At Demand I made over $700 on good months, but that has changed in the last couple of years. I write for the Parenting category and when there are titles I still earn, but titles have been scarce this past year and a half.
   
   I am hoping HubPages sticks around for a while. I love to write, whether I earn or not, but don't really want to start a niche blog. I feel like I would be tied down to one or two subjects if I did that.

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