Suggestion: Stop Assigning Individual Hub Scores

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   Wife Who Savesposted 13 years ago

   I read 20 or more hubs nearly everyday, and I've enjoyed quite a few whose hub scores were only in the 50's or 60's. I, as a hubber, realize that some of these hubs may be new and upcoming, while others are old but may not have many visitors. People who are not part of Hubpages, however, may believe that the score represents the intrinsic value of the article. They would pass over hubs with lower scores even though that particular article may have the exact information they seek.
   
   Personally, I see no value in assigning scores to hubs. The community seems to do a good job of flagging inappropriate hubs. People join because of their love of writing and their desire to share knowledge with others. Helping others should be the guiding factor, not untrained writers assigning grades to each other. If you look at other major writing sites such as Associated Content, eHow, Triond, InfoBarrel, Bukisa, Xomba and others, they do not use a numerical grading scale on their articles. I believe that individual hub scores are misleading to the general public.
   
   I would appreciate reading other people's opinions - pro and con - on this issue.

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2. 67

   darksideposted 13 years ago

   Stop fixating on the arbitrary number that is in a fixed location on each and every hub.
   
   I pay little attention to them on my own as well as on others.
   
   While the community does participate in cleaning up, the HubScore algorithm checks for duplicity and other factors that would take more time than worth investing for even the most active and loyal hubber. If the hub drops below 40, all links are nofollowed, thus nullifying whatever advantage a spammer would hope to gain from flooding the site with low quality content.
   
   The general public would have no idea what the number stands for.

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      Wife Who Savesposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      I hadn't thought about spammers being caught by low hub scores, so I guess it does have value.

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   ryankettposted 13 years ago

   I can safely say that, I for one, never notice the hubscore of other peoples hubs.
   
   I used to notice hubberscore, but no longer pay any attention to this either.
   
   I can't see too much of an issue, although I can't speak for others. Maybe you are right, maybe you are wrong, I can only speak for myself.
   
   What I would say however is that none of those sites mentioned, with the exception of eHow, are as successful as Hubpages
   
   Most recent monthly US traffic stat, courtesy of Quantcast:
   
   eHow: Approx 48m
   Associated Content: Approx 27.5m
   Triond: Approx 800k
   InfoBarrel: Approx 140k
   Bukisa: Approx 425k
   Xomba: Approx 2.5m
   Hubpages: Approx 35m
   
   It should be noted that eHow was launched in 1999, Associated Content was started in 2005.
   
   Hubpages was launched in 2006. I would perhaps suggest that Hubpages should not be following the lead of less successful sites, rather most of those sites mentioned would be well served to pay attention to precisely what it is that makes Hubpages successful.
   
   Follow the leader so to speak. Hubpages has 7 years to achieve an extra 13m unique US visitors per month, if they achieve that then they will equal the feat of eHow. Personally I suspect that they will achieve this within 18 months.
   
   Hubpages just works, I wouldnt change much of it. That said, I am not discounting the earnings potential of some of those sites for the individual - always good to spread your content around just in case. Particularly when you see what has happened to Digg (traffic halved basically).

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      Wife Who Savesposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      You have a valid point. I never checked the number of visitors, nor did I realize that some of them are not in the same league as Hubpages. Maybe I am seeing too much into this --- I've always been a math and numbers person.

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         ryankettposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         I would just point out, before you decide to jack in those other sites, that the important thing to you as a contributor is not the overall traffic to a site but the traffic to your individual content.
         
         InfoBarrel may not be a heavyweight yet, but by all accounts it ranks well and can be a great earner. Its relative the the size of the site of course, there are 1 million hubpages.
         
         InfoBarrel is probably the only one out of that list which I believe has comparable earnings potential to Hubpages for the contributor, I have started building the occassional article over there... its a good site. Very polite staff as well, they rejected my first article for having a self-serving link but were very good about it and as a result I simply removed the link and republished.
         
         Its all about the people behind it in my opinion, and IB is one which will undoubtedly show some good growth.

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            Uninvited Writerposted 13 years agoin reply to this

            I thought InfoBarrel was US only?

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               ryankettposted 13 years agoin reply to this

               No I don't think so, well I certainly didn't use a fake address! If it asked for an address that is, and if it didn't ask for an address, then it certainly had no way of knowing where I was from

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      TopUniverseposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Interesting read thanks.

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   ryankettposted 13 years ago

   UW, just checked sign up form, doesn't ask for an address.

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      Uninvited Writerposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Send me your referral through email here and I'll sign up

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         ryankettposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         Cool!
         
         Although the referral scheme is crummy! 2% of AdSense impressions!

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   Uninvited Writerposted 13 years ago

   Okay, that's good.

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