Where to go after HubPages?

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   Robert Sacchiposted 2 months ago

   Does anyone know of other writing farms besides Medium?  I want to see what options I have.

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      ryanpugsposted 2 weeks agoin reply to this

      There was no such thing as a content farm until about the noughties.
      
      The first novel was published in the 11th century, the first newspaper was published in the 16th century.
      
      Why is there such a dependence from some writers on sites like this?
      
      There are still newspapers (albeit most of their readership is digital), there are still magazines, and journals, and still book publishers.
      
      Meanwhile, anybody can start a blog (and make it as much like a magazine as they do or don't want).
      
      Why not write a book?
      
      Content farms have died because they don't really serve any purpose and never really have. They only ever existed to hoover up search traffic and rake in the adsense revenue.
      
      If you want to read articles on any specific subject you can find a site which caters entirely to that.
      
      I understand why contributors might enjoy the social nature of a content farm, but can any of you honestly say that they offer much value to the typical reader?
      
      What would you need to be looking for online to find some value in a search result from a content farm?
      
      And when you realise that they offer the world nothing of value, you perhaps ask yourself what value you offer by contributing to one?

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         theraggededgeposted 2 weeks agoin reply to this

         "And when you realise that they offer the world nothing of value, you perhaps ask yourself what value you offer by contributing to one?"
         
         12 million views across a couple hundred articles seems to suggest that some people found value in my articles on this particular content farm

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            ryanpugsposted 2 weeks agoin reply to this

            I'm not intending to demean any specific writer or claiming that there is zero value derived by a single person in any specific article (11 million for me in 3 years on Hubpages 2009-2012 by the way, happy to say I offered very little value and just loved the Adsense).
            
            Although would point out that the view registers before the reader decides whether they derive any value.
            
            But the concept of a content farm as a whole has always been a questionable one. Essentially intended to dominate search results to take as much traffic as possible in order to profit from Adsense, at one point search results (pre Panda and Penguin) were dominated by your eHow and your Squidoo, and a lot of it was dreadful quality.
            
            My point was that there are specialist sites in whatever niche you could possibly think of.
            
            If you wanted to read reviews for the best laptops in 2023, would you trust this random hubber from Nagpur in India, who describes themselves not as an IT specialist but as a "content creator", and lists absolutely no credentials, or even a headshot, who almost certainly has only actually used one of these laptops at the most (and highly likely none):
            
            https://discover.hubpages.com/technolog … -to-buy-in
            
            Or would you trust a TechRadar article, where their experienced team of specialist contributors have actually tried and tested a large number of laptops?
            
            https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-c … ps-1304361
            
            Or this one from PCMag, where they have also tried and tested the laptops
            
            https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-la … _variant=B
            
            My point really is there has never been a point in time where an internet user has thought "I want to know about X and Y, I know I'll go and visit a content farm where I might be able to trawl through hundreds of pages of spam and find something of value".
            
            Google was right to give them all a whack in circa-2011 when the first two pages of many google results was dominated by them, at the expense of expert and specialists.
            
            When I joined Hubpages in 2009 there was a chap called Ryan Hupfer working for them running a 30 hubs in 30 days challenge, that should tell you all you need to know about their focus on quantity over quality at that time. The focus on quality only came after Google gave the content farms all a big slap for dominating the search results with all the guff that resulted from things like that.
            
            In fact, looks like they were still pushing that challenge in 2014!
            
            https://hubpages.com/community/Advantag … th-A-Twist
            
            What would the quality of your output have been if you'd published 1 hub a day for the 15 years you have been here I wonder, which is the rate they were encouraging there, you'd have approximately 11,000 hubs.
            
            
            What is the value in an article called "Top 5 Best Video Game Movies"
            
            When it transpires that it is actually the authors 5 favourite video game movies that he's watched, out of presumably the tiny proportion he has watched
            
            https://hubpages.com/entertainment/Top- … ame-Movies
            
            We have sites like IMDB where movies are ranked based on user reviews.
            
            That's the type of guff I used to churn out to. Absolutely no value, and intended only to generate search clicks for ad profit.

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   Anita Haschposted 2 months ago

   looks like ai to me. Nobody could look so weird

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   EB Blackposted 4 weeks ago

   You can also try Substack.

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      Robert Sacchiposted 4 weeks agoin reply to this

      Is there a way to make money through substack?

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   daydreamsposted 4 weeks ago

   I moved some stuff to Medium but I reckon making money from writing like this is dead

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   Robert Sacchiposted 2 weeks ago

   I earned a total of 1 cent with Medium so far.  On that basis I have to agree with you.

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6. 59

   theraggededgeposted 2 weeks ago

   There are/were plenty of specialists here who garnered a decent audience, whether it be tech related or answering a query about ear mites in dogs.
   
   In any case, quality articles were usually at the top end of SERPS so the argument that people didn't head for HubPages to find information is a moot point - they didn't have to; good work rose to the top.
   
   Of course, content farms have had their day and one of the upsides is a whole lot of substandard crap will disappear with them.

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