What's the Point of Writing Online?

You join a 'writing' site, that is an 'online publishing' venue.

You have checked the Terms Of Service (TOS) to make sure you don't lose your
copyright.

You have checked the rates of payment and although not much, you agree.

If you are brand new you might think there is some proofreading or a real
editor.

You have not yet grasped this is not a Writing site...although it may call it self such, it is actually a Publishing site.

What's the difference you think.

A writing site, like a hardcopy magazine, has Editors, has various sections, and what is judged is quality and relevance,

A publishing site, (which all of these 'writing sites' really are) is a venue which virtually publishes anything. There is no actual human moderation, no real standards, and no real 'pay'.

Your work may be 'judged' by an A.I.; some sort of app which checks for certain words or standards. For example, on a particular site to be featured your item needs X number of photographs, X number of links, X number of words in Bold type. This is set by the owner of the site.

People who catch this algorithm can publish absolute rubbish but it will get that 'star' because it is the A.I. which 'judges' not wetware.

Your work might be judged by other users who, in competition with you, see an item, decide to plagiarize it, so vote down your own. .

But you don't know this the day you join.

You write your very first piece and it's published, and you feel like you've won something. You are a published writer!

You wait to see if anyone reads your writing and you learn that you have to Market your work. No one, not the site, not the advertisers, not the tooth fairy markets your work.

Maybe you think its unfair.

After all, the people who may come to the site to read your work are the ones who will see the ads, and the advertisers should do something to help you. The Site, which makes money from your work should do more than give you a template.

But alas, you learn, maybe within a few minutes, hours, weeks, years, that writers are six a penny. The only people who make money are those who own the site.

You join Adsense as most sites only pay by Adsense.

This means you could have 1M hits, but get Nothing unless you join Adsense.

This means your work will be smothered in ads.

Maybe you also join Amazon and post their ads on your page. Now your prose can barely be found amid all the ads. Amazon pays Nothing unless the reader clicks on the Amazon ad and buys the product. Then you get a tiny little kick back.

Hence you learn, to your sadness, that Amazon ads are often a total waste. In fact, they are a detriment. Not only do they add to the clutter on the page but some unemployed reader who can't write a shopping list and spends its days trying to hurt others might flag the article as the Amazon Ad doesn't match the article.

This means you have to spend more time either changing the ad or removing it, or altering the prose, etc.

So you've now learned three things about online writing.

Firstly; that the writing is totally incidental.
Secondly, you have to market your own work.
Thirdly, you have to smother your article with Ads, some of which are detriments.

Over Time you learn about Search Engine Optimization; (SEO).

This is a trick in which you find particular popular words or terms and shove them into your article in as many styles as you can so that when someone enters those words into any search engine they'll be directed to your page.

The more matching, the higher up on the search one's article will be.

This means that the person who couldn't write a 'B' paper in High School but knows how to manipulate search engines gets the hits and the cash.

The person who doesn't use SEO can be a Pulitzer winning author but won't get the hits nor the cash.

So here comes the major dilemma:

Do you write unmitigated rubbish with nauseating repetitions so as to catch the Search Engine which will direct thousands of people to your page or do you go for quality?

Don't be afraid that the reader will see your garbage and jump off so that the hit doesn't register. Most people open a few different browser windows at the same time. Hence although no eye is on the page, it has been up long enough to get that 'hit'.

Hence, no one reads the rubbish, you just get paid.

Or, do you write what you want, as you want, as best as you can, and get 6c at the end of the month?

A chap on Triond wrote a complete fabrication. It was garbage from word 1 to word 765. Millions of people clicked on the site and he made thousands of dollars. Others have a template in which they pop in the 'What's Trending' terms.

"Everyone today is interested in 0000. People all over the world are concerned about 0000. But 0000 is nothing to worry about. Many people have learned that 0000 can be..."

Over and over, saying nothing but replacing 0000 with this minutes 'hot topic'.

You can continue to write and publish your best work and maybe after five years make $200 from of 1000 different articles on five different sites.

You can figure out how to cash in on SEO terms and write rubbish you don't want to hang your name off of but make enough to pay your light bill.

You can become totally discouraged so that you don't bother writing online any more.

You can create your own blog so that you can be ignored on your own terms.

You can use the various sites as storage for work you plan on tying into a thesis or book or polished articles when you get around to them.

You can pray that along will come a site which pays and has human moderation and proofreading of some level and that you will be marketed and maybe feel like you aren't wasting your time.

But as things stand now, writing on line is like writing for your school paper.