I hate to be the one, but somebody must expose content sites like associatedcontent.com. Just like always internet users have fallen for the latest great sounding thing that has to do with making money online including myself. When I first learned about these types of sites, I couldn’t wait to get started. You mean I can make money for doing what I love to do? Those were my thoughts exactly. I published a few articles at the first content site that I joined then I found out about associatedcontent.com. After I found out about associatedcontent.com like many others I presume, its brilliant look immediately had me believing that I could make some real money and gain some creditability as a writer through publishing articles there. A few months later I realized the making good money part "wasn’t" going to happen. I submitted many articles and got a good amount of views but I was making little money for all my efforts. So I did what most people would do when something isn’t working like you believed it would, I gave up on it. At the beginning of this year a close friend and I decided to create a social networking site. After creating the site we wanted to make money from it so I started joining many different affiliate networks as a publisher. From being in these affiliate networks I learned all the different ways that you can make money from advertisements on your website. This knowledge allowed me to know and understand how sites like associatedcontent.com make big money. They simply pay you little for article views and they make the real money from your ad impressions and clicks. The more publishers they have the more impressions and possible clicks they will receive so you are a dime a dozen to them (trust me I run websites). You would have to submit thousands of articles (good articles) to make any kind of real money (40-50 dollars which still isn't much). While your getting paid 40 cent for 1000 impressions their probably making over $8-$9 dollars. So if you have the time and don’t mind getting paid little while others profit extremely from your talent than those types of sites are for you. Otherwise I suggest that you write for more fair and balanced content sites such as hudpages.com or http://advisingwriters.com/ which let's you get 100% of your advertisement dollars, because you actually have a chance to make some decent money through advertisement clicks related to your article which is one of the ways http://www.associatedcontent.com makes lots of money which you don't get a cut of.For me it's either blog sites or posting poems on http://www.unitedworldpoets.com.