Helium is a freelance writing website that has its share of fans, but also has received a lot of bad press from belligerent writers who have had bad experiences. So is Helium a good place for beginning freelance writers to make money online, or is it a scam you need to stay away from? Since Helium.com is one of the most common websites that starting online writers run into. Helium is an unusual writing website in that they really emphasize community and a ratings system that has writers reading and rating other writers. There are several ways to make money at this site. Writers have opportunities to make money in the market place, weekly contests, as well as the normal revenue sharing streams that many online freelance writers should be familiar with from writing on sites like Associated Content, which pay a PPV (pay per view) bonus, or from sites like Xomba, where you share in the AdSense revenue your articles help to produce. Very recently Helium announced that they have recently introduced up front payments, although there is a catch to this, as well.

Helium is not a complete scam, because they do pay writers (whether or not it's a rip-off is up for debate). You can get paid for your work but you'll never know exactly how amounts are figured because the TOS on payment are vague at best. Also, you absolutely must have at least one rating star to get paid. If you don't have a rating star from having at least 50 articles rated in the past month (or possibly 90 days, it's hard to tell), then you will not receive a single penny of the money your articles make. So it will never be truly passive income.

So since you're all freelance writers, let's also get to money. It stinks. There's no other way to put it than that. There are several ways to make money, and some might not seem so bad a pay rate, but there's a reason that I can say freelance writing for Helium does not pay off. Let's go over how the money works:

1) Helium Contests. There are weekly contests for channels where the writers who get the most points, through a combination of total articles written and overall rankings, get some decent pay outs by the end of the week.

Problems: I use the word "decent" in the loosest, sense of the word. The second problem: they say they 'discourage' the practice of uploading all 20-25 articles at once at the end of the week, since early articles tend to naturally rise in the rankings, giving someone who does this an unfair advantage. By having all these articles uploaded right before deadline, the combination of scores is likely to put that person into first place because there isn't enough voting time for the quality of these articles to be judged. Despite 'discouraging' this practice, it happens all the time and those who complain are been reported as sometimes even being banned.

2) Helium Marketplace. This is where Helium money has to be made, according to many sources. The competition in marketplaces is huge, and it's not unusual to see over 200 articles per request. There has also been rumblings online (disclaimer: these are alleged and while this has been repeated by several individuals it's almost impossible to get rock hard evidence either way) that many of the markets looking for content are actually fictional or owned by Helium, so they're being used to generate content without picking someone to pay.

Additionally, even if these are all completely legitimate, here's the thing: if you're good enough to consistently beat out 300+ people in the marketplace, then spend $75 on a Writer's Market with a one year online subscription and make the big bucks writing for big time print markets.

3) Residual Income from profit sharing at Helium. The Helium writing site spends a lot of time enticing writers with this promise, but is it a really good deal? With over one hundred articles that have been uploaded since February, over 3/4 of which are #1 in their category, including several "front page features," I have acquired a whopping $17.71. Other people talk about $300 a month for 500 articles...I find that incredibly unlikely.

And if you're that good at promotion, why not write online for some place that pays a lot more per view, like Associated Content, which also more easily ranks near the top of Google, giving you more traffic for real passive income, which doesn't disappear the moment you're under one rating star. Since you don't have to waste your valuable time rating what is often times really terrible writing.

4) Upfront payments from Helium for freelance writers. Yes, they now offer up front payments. But these up front payments are also conditional. You have to have one rating and writing star for the entire month, including when rankings and earnings are figured at the end of the month. Upfront payments are also dependant on your writing stars and range from $0.50 to $2.50 per article. AC still easily has them beat here with $3-5 an article for upfront payments (and their bonus for page views is far better than Helium's - the two aren't even comparable).

But you don't get upfront payments as a true beginner. You need a minimum of one writing star in order to qualify for upfront payments. In theory, if your articles are in qualified topics and rank on average in the top quarter, you can get a writing star with 4 articles. You can get three at 100 articles, and 5 isn't until you reach until the 500 article mark. So some early articles you won't get paid for. And if your rankings mysteriously fall right before payday (something that happens quite often if you're on the edge) then you might lose out quite a bit by getting knocked down.

And there's the fact that it is still a ridiculously small amount of money and that there are far better sites to put your writing on. For a full and complete review, check out my freelance writing blog post on a complete Helium for freelance writers review.

Associated Content isn't even close to being the best place online to write, either.  If you want more promising places, look at different sites like Constant-Content, or one of my favorites: eHow.  You can even read my personal experiences at eHow or go to my blog to find a freelance writing website eHow review.

So what's the cash difference between Helium & Associated Content?

A ton. Let's hypothetically say you upload 100 articles from scratch to Helium vs. AC. We'll also assume that you get the maximum payment for every Helium article, and the lowest end of average for AC ($3 each, and you're losing a ton of change if you go by this average, if not outright dollar bills - and I'm not saying AC is the best, but it is compared to Helium, IMO). And we're even assuming only 3/4 of AC articles are approved for upfront payment, so you don't get any upfront money for your writing for a quarter of the articles. Assuming this:

Upfront payment from Associated Content: $225 (and in reality it would probably be much higher).

Upfront payment from Helium: $83.50 (and remember, this is the absolute maximum possible starting from 0 to 100)

That's a $131.50 difference right off the bat for the EXACT SAME AMOUNT OF WORK! Based on my experience, in a good month you can expect about $3.60 from Helium in residual income. That's it. So $87.10 for 100 articles of work assuming everything breaks right.

For 100 articles with Associated Content, I'm even going to estimate low. You usually get the most views right off the bat, but I'll going to figure average page views for 100 articles that are a year old, and we're figuring you don't have a single breakout article on AC out of those 100. Also not likely, but hey, that's what we're figuring. Shame on you for not doing better ;)

For those 100, on a bad month, expect $15 if you don't do any promotion at all. So what does this lead to? $240 worst case scenario for AC as opposed to $87.10 for a best case scenario. It wouldn't be unrealistic to think the actual numbers far closer to $330 to $80 or even bigger. So defend Helium if you want, but why as a freelance writer would you do the same amount of work for $150 less or worse?