Helium.com has been sold
I just discovered that and was just reading their forums/announcement about it. I just recently stopped rating (they can have my $35 a month
because I just can't rate any more of those). Anyway, it's interesting....One Spring I had a "flu thing", so I had little energy for anything but writing. I spent about a month writing on Helium and got a "ton" of "articles" on there, which gave me a head start. After that initial spurt, I'd just write there (instead of here) when I felt like it. I got 500 articles built up (but now they've kicked down to high 400's for "articles" (but they aren't really articles) and another 100 or so as "creative writing".
I wrote to the titles they had (and this was 4 or so years ago, so the titles were different). Even so, a lot of them did OK in search engines. (Some are just weird.
) I pretty much stopped writing there (when they got into the whole "writers' collaborative thing" (not right for me), but in the last two years or so I got so I just couldn't rate any more articles. I'd skip and skip until I got poems to rate, and I'd do a few here or there. Sometimes I'd use the poem titles as a way to challenge myself in writing a poem, and I'd stop rating.
It took awhile, but I went from 5 rating stars to 2, which is what I've had up until about a month ago. As long as you have a rating star your stuff earns and you get paid (if it's over $25). I did only - like - 4/5 ratings a week, just to get my $30/35, and I kept thinking it was an easy few minutes a week for that much pay. I was just too burned out with reading stuff I wasn't interested in, and eventually I got so I couldn't stand reading yet one more (often bad) poem.
So, that's it. Their new thing isn't just that writers can't delete whatever they want to delete, but now there's the one-year exclusive thing with any articles. Besides, things are so complicated there now, I really can't deal with learning it all at this point. In ways, they were very good to me. They offered me opportunities that were kind of surprising (but not right for me).
Other than the ad revenue share, I've had the occasional article (or later, license to an article) sold here or there, but that $30-something I mentioned didn't include any of those. Oh... I imagine in a few weeks I'll probably go back and spend my fifteen minutes of rating time and get paid each month again. For now, I'm just too burned out on rating stuff (when I haven't written more than the occasional, silly, poem for years).I have yet to figure out how to earn anything from Hubpages. Although, in fairness (and honesty) most of the pieces I've submitted to Hp were dupes - before that was officially disallowed.
One other writer on here, for whose own privacy I'll not mention, said to me that she actually earns (or earned - we have to catch up) more here than on AC (associatedcontent), where we first encountered each other('s writing).
I have literally made not one cent from here. I know part of the reason is that I didn't know how to set up all that monetizing stuff. I just wanted to write a piece (my heart prefers poetry, but my wallet guided me to TRY to write to titles that were both popular and at least somewhat interesting to me - and to which I could write with competence) - and submit it to every UGC (user-generated content) site that I knew. Granted, my non-poetry stuff ended up being rants - well-written but CLEARLY opinion/editorial, and so not every site's cup of tea. But, a couple of years ago when I started doing this online writing thing, every piece I wrote was a dupe submit.
That included helium (which is my first online writing experience - and to which my loyalty remains), as well as AssociatedConent. thisisbyus(TIBU - no longer exists), editred (no longer exists), disaboom (not a money-generating site -but which is personally very important and meaningful to me because it caters to and features writers with disabilities)...what else - helium, ac, hub, tibu, editred, - I guess that's it. The only factor that influenced this was that some sites had more liberal standards wrt the nature and expression of content (sexual/violent - not my thing, but also allowed f-bombs and the like, which, especially in my political/legal pieces, would surface every once in awhile).
Any, back to the earnings thing, at Helium - and I think most of the others too, your earnings are residual - you don't have to write 500 articles for every $35 you're gonna earn. Still, you of course want to write to topical titles, but I think the residual income is a pretty darned cool thing. That, and if you fancy yourself any kind of "real" writer, you're working at it (almost) every day. I wouldn't expect to make any real money at this unless I actually treated it like a job - writing/marketting/promoting my stuff for 40 hours a week at least - and of course soliciting work from paper publications and the various marketplace publishers associated with the aforementioned UGC sites.
Still - that I do have a full-time job (that I absolutely adore, love and am grateful and blessed to have - working with disabled kids, who are God's angels on this Earth!) - means that I can be happy with an approach that earns me between $40-100 a month - and more if I take a more disciplined and regular approach to the commercial writing, and actually submitted to more marketplace publishers for their $5-20/piece listings.
Hub for me is a fading thing, I'm afraid - only because of that recent freakin' Google upheaval, and that if I'm gonna submit a piece that I can't submit elsewhere - Helium is still my first choice.
Sorry, K....
-stanHello Stanley, I first started writing at Helium and managed to do well, even selling a few creative pieces. But I got banned for exposing their lies to the members and they still make money on my articles. There is even a KindleBook with one of my stories featured for sale on Amazon.
I get nothing for it, of course, as I get nothing for the articles they kept and still display on their grubby little site. Personally, I hope they go belly-up in the near future.
I still make many times the money here than Helium offers to its members. Just my own personal experience with the site.
I read about this several days ago on the Helium forums, Marisa. The usual "great news for writers" BS was bandied about by the Rev and the usual cheerleaders.
I've been earning about $1 a month with 29 articles on Helium and a little over double that with 20 articles here using HP Ads, so I'm fairly underwhelmed with both.
I've got Helium rating down to about 20 minutes a month to keep at 1-2 rating stars.
I've now switched off HP Ads and gone back to Adsense since at least their stats don't keep freezing.
I invested in Market Samurai, but so far all it tells me is that all the key words I find for things I could write about are rubbish! My best performing hub, which scores reasonably well in MS is on page 4 of Google.
So now I now longer have a clue what to write. I am useless at technology and not in the least interested in fashion, celebrities and pop music. The only popular area I do know a lot about from personal experience is weight loss. However, that topic is now being penalised here.
My true, serious interests are not crowd pullers by any means
I've tried the backlinking business. I've found I get a minor blip of visits on a targeted hub for a day or two as a result, so I might get 3-4 visits instead of 0-2, but that is all.
I started writing hoping to set up some residual income, so I can at least stop working 12-18 hour days when I reach "retirement" age (can never retire because pension fund is too small), but that is a fast fading dream.
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