Freelancing at Home

More proof that you should stay away from eHow because eHow sucks.

From Community Manager, Rich:

"We’ve noticed the buzz around eHow’s new UK website and specifically the questions of whether WCP participants are paid for their articles shown on our sister website. We appreciate all the comments, as our community is what makes us special, and wanted to clearly address your concerns. At the moment we do not have a system to pay writers for their articles hosted on eHow.co.uk.

We’ve listened to your voices and since we are unable pay WCP participants in the UK, we’ll be removing your articles from eHow’s UK website within the next few weeks. We’ll keep you posted on our progress and thank you for your patience and commitment to eHow.

Best Regards,
The eHow Team"

I wrote about eHow already and warned that it is not the best place to write due to numerous bugs that make the site unusable as well as the general unprofessional-ness of the community managers, but I still ended up saying, if you want to risk it, the money is there.

Apparently, I was lying.

Since November my earnings have been cut by an average of $2 per day. This, according to veterans of online writing, is normal unless you publish a lot of holiday articles. That made sense. Well, come the beginning of January, the CPC on all my topics was back to where it should be and yet my earnings are slowly slipping to be less by $2.50 on average per day.

And today, I made a whopping $1.16 when before November I was averaging $7 and even now I was still averaging $5 a day. Hm. What could possibly be wrong?

Well it seems eHow overstepped its bounds and took every article ever written by its members and placed them on its new sister site, eHow UK. And then they failed to compensate us for it. And when asked if we were being compensated, members were met with vague answers that answered totally different questions or just didn't answer anything at all.

It was announced today, more than five months after the launch of eHow UK and the theft of member articles, that they were 'listening' to us and pulling all USA 'user' articles from their UK site.

It will take them a few weeks to remove them though, so don't look forward to your earnings getting back to normal anytime soon.

Oh, and after they remove them? You'll still have to wait a few weeks for the unusable link - that will actually redirect to another page within the UK site anyway - to clear out of search engine caches. And if you were unable to find your US eHow article on the search engine, you'll have to wait for the unusable link to clear out before the new one will be able to be found.

Good scam eHow. Did you make a lot of money off this little legal stumble? Do you feel good about the way you continue to walk all over and kick your members?

There you have it, more reason not to write for eHow.com.