Freelancing at Home

I'm sure the Internet is a flurry by now, with the news of eHow's 'exciting' changes. I'm equally sure that 99% if not 100% of the information going around now is negative.

Surprisingly, as much as I despise how eHow has chosen to do this (ie, telling us on April 5 that they are discontinuing the Writer's Compensation Program on April 5) I am not against the change.

First, what's going on.

Today, when I woke up from my naptime, I wandered over to eHow to run my eHow earning's tracker (created by the wonderful 17of26, by the way) and I get this huge popup that reads:

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Demand Studios is now the exclusive platform for writing new articles for eHow.com

This change will not impact your existing articles or payments currently affiliated with the Writer Compensation Program. For more on this change and how it affects you, please check your eHow and your personal email accounts.

My sleep addled brain didn't quite understand any of this and it didn't help that I had absolutely no e-mail or PMs from eHow explaining what it was talking about - for the record, as of right now, 7PM on April 5, I still haven't received an acceptance/denial e-mail.

What's going on though is that the WCP is being canceled. Articles that were published pre-April 5 will continue to earn just as they always have. No change at all. You can't publish new articles though. If you had articles in draft, you have 7 days to try and get them published under the WCP - good luck with that, the publishing tool is still broken, and now we all know why they didn't bother to try and fix it.

So to make life easier for both eHow writers and for Demand Studios HR department, they are pre-approving eHow members who had a high acceptance rate (in other words, you had less than 20% of your articles deleted during sweeps or outside of sweeps by eHow staff. This does not include articles you deleted yourself). Of course, all the approval and denial letters are not going out at the same time, because that would just make the world too calm and coherent. So while some are reading their e-mails and asking questions, those of us who didn't get an e-mail are going wtf are you talking about!?

I, myself, received a message from a community manager on Demand Studios, Remy:

My name is Remi and I’m the Community Manager at Demand Studios. You’ve been vocal about publishing and writing on eHow.com and I want to make sure your Demand Studios experiences are positive ones. If you’d like to talk to me about Demand Studios, please reply with your phone number and I’ll give you a call.

Seeing as I hadn't/haven't gotten my acceptance letter I was even more confused by this and sent my phone number right on out. Remi called shortly after, maybe 30 minutes - very prompt, and I was informed that I was accepted.

Apparently those who were 'vocal' about eHow's past mistakes, you know, like the eHow UK scam or members receiving death threats or eHow 'fixes' that never happened received this e-mail. Most likely to give them the lowdown in a more calm environment than the eHow forums are turning out to be. I enjoyed the phone call, personally. Others who received it are making a big deal out of it, like they're blacklisted or something. Personally, eHow, if this is a blacklist, keep me on it, I enjoyed talking with Remi and she was very polite.

So now you know what's happening, let's talk about what the eHow merger with Demand Studios means for everyone.