Examiner.com closing down - another one bites the dust

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   Marisa Wrightposted 7 years ago

   Yet another revenue-sharing site closes down. 
   
   This is yet another indicator that there's no future for sites which don't specialise, unless they're news sites.   
   
   Looking back, we've seen the closure of Squidoo, Helium, Associated Content, Yahoo! Voices, Bubblews, Zujava, Triond, Suite101, Demand Studios, Flixya - the list goes on.  I wonder about Infobarrel - some time ago they started launching a "new direction" but it all fizzled out. 
   
   I'm so glad that HubPages has decided to go down the specialist route before it was too late!

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2. 76

   Wesman Todd Shawposted 7 years ago

   The guys at IB are obviously spending most of their time on some other project at present. They have all sorts of updates planned, and have for a long time.  I always liked those guys because they'd e-mail me about specific things they thought I needed to change on a page, and they'd let me know exactly who I was talking to.
   
   Some of their software and set up has always annoyed me. But I've got a handful of pages there which continually make a bit of money. And they were ahead of the curve in some other ways. Their software won't allow for you to over use any keywords or phrases. That annoyed the hell out of me too for a while, but I saw the wisdom in it.
   
   I lost my amazon account though. I can't sell amazon on IB because I was off line for over a year, and never responded to some email amazon sent out which asked for everyone to certify they weren't targeting children 13 or younger online. Reading the forums on IB I realized I was not the only person to wind up with that problem. The problem doesn't apply here, as HP has a different sort of relationship with amazon.com.

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   1. 86

      Marisa Wrightposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Amazon will close you down for inactivity as well, so you'd possibly have lost your account anyway.  How annoying!   
      
      Infobarrel seemed promising at first but I never made any real income there.  Same with Wizzley which is still in existence - I think because it's a one-man-band who doesn't have an office of staff to pay!

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3. 82

   earnerposted 7 years ago

   Examiner was never on my radar.  Maybe it was US-focussed? I'm in the UK and, certainly in the early days, a lot of sites were "US only" and others were so "US-styled" they were off-putting to me as they didn't speak the same language and had different cultural leanings to my interests (e.g. Thanksgiving and American football, US elections etc).
   
   So it's not been a site I've ever been active with - or even ever read.

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4. STAFF

   Paul Edmondsonposted 7 years ago

   For us, things are going well, but it's still evolving. I'm sure a new generation will emerge. There is still a need for a place to create useful information and pay folks for doing it.  To me, the innovation and competition is how to increase the production value of content to be as good as professional houses within an economic model that works. Everyday people have the knowledge, but readers prefer well polished guides.
   
   We are interested in acquiring sites that fit our model. The Examiner isn't the right fit, but thanks for posting about what's happening in this space.

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   1. 86

      Marisa Wrightposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Paul, I think the point to draw from Examiner's closure is the rightness of HubPages' decision to change its business model.   Examiner's big problem was not the quality of its writers but the generalist nature of its content.
      
      As you probably know, I was pessimistic about HubPages' future for a long time.  I was hopeful that the move to niche sites would change that and so far, it certainly seems so.

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