Freelancing at Home

Firefox News, - Firefox.org - not to be confused with the Firefox web browser, is a site that claims to offer 99% of ad profits to the freelance writers that work there. You sign up for your own Google Adsense account and your ads display on your content.

The problem is, Firefox News is a scam. Now, most scams imply that you lose money or that they steal content or something else, but I see a theft of my time as being just as important as theft of my money. After all, time is money and that is probably more true for the freelance writer than for anyone else. Each minute I spent writing an article for Firefox News, each second I spent working out how to use their publishing tool - and that was no walk in the park; it took at least an hour to just figure out what it was wanting from me - was time I could have spent writing for a real company.

I have no idea what is going on with this place. It opened up to outside writers because the normal writers that were being hired were just up and dropping out. This is all according to an announcement that verified accounts were able to access when I first joined in June 2009. To keep content coming at a regular pace, the moderator/owner wanted more writers to show up. Well, I took the bate. I submitted content. A month after I submitted my first article - a review of a brand new movie, that was technically no longer brand new at the end of that month - it was still not accepted, declined or anything else. I finally removed my article a month and a half in to the wait and ended up making my own blog to put it on: the horror movie blog.

I threw in the towel, obviously, and didn't bother to submit anything else. Four months later I checked back and saw that my article was declined for having no content (I couldn't figure out how to actually remove the whole article so I just deleted the contents of it). So it took two months at the very least to get around to reviewing a new article - keep in mind this is a site that wants to do new movie, television and anime reviews. New meaning just having come out, not two - or more - months old.

Further study shows that the owner and his other moderators only apparently get around to to reviewing/approving around three articles a day. How they plan to get on top with that little, I have no idea.

I am calling this site a scam because I have heard multiple stories that sound like exact repeats of mine. I have not heard of a single freelance writer that has been reviewed at all, let alone earned from this scam of a website. Use your time more wisely, look into some other companies like Xomba or make your own Blogger review blog. If reviews were why you were interested in the Firefox News scam then both these options could get you some real revenue; they both offer a lot of viewability to movie reviews, television show reviews and the like.

Maybe Firefox News will get it someday: leaving freelance writers hanging is not the way to do business.