Freelancing at Home

The site may still be there and it may still show up in search engines (not that I used the site since I knew what bunk most of the articles were), but to freelance writers, eHow.com is no longer the cash cow it once was.

Today, May 5, I received an e-mail that announced "Important news about your articles on ehow.com". At first I held my breath thinking they were once again deleting content at random as they had been doing for months. Well, I was partially right, but boy was I ever wrong. What I read instead floored me, smacked me in the face and then kicked me in the ribs a couple times. eHow is closing down the WCP permanently.

It's closing down today and, unless you take their special offer, you will receive your last payment (for May 1 - 5, despite the fact that they won't remove articles until May 30) next month, as usual (even if you don't make $10). If you do accept the offer you'll receive your next two payouts on June 15 and July 15.

It's a logical step, but all this time we've been told our articles will remain posted and continue to earn. I feel like I was lied to. I shouldn't be shocked though considering the week before closing the WCP they told us there were no plans to close the WCP.

After doing my last post about Examiner.com almost being a scam, I have found myself skyrocketed into the top 5 of my local examiners. No, the post had nothing to do with this raise, it just happened to happen. Halloween is what is giving me this raise, as I have a variety of Halloween articles on Examiner, including How to do Punk Zombie Makeup.

What I wanted to talk about was my earnings while I have been in these top 5 examiners within my area. Because what I'm seeing really makes me cringe, not to mention doubt all the people who claim to easily make the $25 payout each month. Oh, I'm sure many national examiners do, but unless my area is unusually low in receiving views from other areas, not as many people who claim to make payout are doing so.

Usually it takes me two months to make $25 with 51 articles.

Now that I'm in the top 5, I'm on target to make about $30 for October. Yes, I have made payout, so it's at least something to celebrate. However, check out my earnings page.

Yes, a whopping 252 views for one day and only making $1.63. This is from a few days ago when I first got onto the top 5 in Pittsburgh list, but the views have only gone higher while the money has stagnated. As of today, I got 435 views and only $2.30 in earnings.

As if that weren't enough to make you sad, I want to point out that since I'm in spot 4 - spot 3 now - that means I am earning more money than everyone from spot 5 down. Since I, in spot 4, am just slightly over payout, that implies that most people in the Pittsburgh area are not regularly making payout.

I've blacked out the title of the article, because that's not really anyone's business but my own, and sorry for the gray marks over the stats; I had it highlighted when I did a screen shot and it came out with the highlighting intact. Oops. Either way, here it is. Views, comments, star rating and earnings. Clearly we make more than a penny a click or a penny per view or whatever it is people are currently theorizing we make.

This article earned 28 cents on its third day of existence. A friend told me he clicked an ad - after some serious probing and questions of 'how did you find this nifty website' and answers of 'one of the links on your article' - and so I watched to see if anything ever showed as significant earnings on the article. Two days after he clicked something, 28 cents appeared, which is within norms of an ad click on this particular keyword phrase. The article was still displaying only one view.

Over the next few weeks, the article has only accumulated a handful of views and only 2 more cents.

No matter how you slice it though, there is no Earthly way this article was earning a penny per click - which would require the amount earned to be a good deal less than the views. Instead, I have 11 cents more in Listmyfive earnings than the number of views on this article.

Listmyfive has remained silent about earnings, but I suspect they will continue to do so, and I only imagine them breaking silence to say, 'please see our FAQ which lays out our payment algorithm' which is the most annoying non-answer ever. If they wanted the algorithm to be transparent they would have made it that way to start with.

Edit: LM5 staff updated information available shortly after I made this post. My theory about Listmyfive earnings was confirmed.

Payments - why do I see a penny here and a penny there? We have explained this a couple of times before, but let me make it a bit more clear. We pay a percentage of the clicks that google adsense reports to us. If they don't report a click, they must have deemed it a fraudulent click. Some clicks are a penny, but most legitimate clicks are much more than that. We don't only pay on clicks though. We use many other variables, it is not a trivial algorithm, it is well thought out, and benefits those that benefit LM5 the most. If you see a penny here and penny there, you were most likely paid from the algorithm and not an ad click. The algorithm can pay much more than a penny here and there as well. Also, the views you see, are not used in the algorithm, they are views for your convenience, to see traffic increases through your online efforts. As you all know, we are a new site, and the amount of traffic we receive from search engines is still relatively low, but it is definitely increasing steadily. With time, as many of you have mentioned and deduced already, search engine traffic will increase dramatically. We need strong solid users initially to make that a future reality. We feel we have a great core of users, and we are very grateful for them.

Okay, Examiner.com is not really a scam and probably won’t ever be an out-and-out scam because they still pay, but over the year I’ve been writing for them, my earnings per view have dwindled. In the beginning, Examiner.com paid almost a penny per view. Then they recalibrated the payout to include some other factors, but it still came out to close to a penny. Now, a year later, I’m down to half a penny per view, if I’m lucky.

Sites can recalibrate their pay all they want, but while Examiner.com is paying less and less per view than ever, they are adding more and more ads than ever. There is a pop-up when you go to login to the site, a Clicksor ad, I believe, and even a bottom banner pop-up when you are trying to publish an article. I should be compensated for being bombarded with ads while trying to work for this site, not earning less than ever before.

On top of that, Examiner.com holds its writers hostage to this pathetic pay. After a year, I have gained a rather large library of articles - not the 300+ that some have, but extensive to me - and the option to leave and just keep earning residual money no longer exists as it did when I joined. Examiner.com now demands that writers post once a month to remain active or Examiner.com doesn’t have to pay you anymore. And if you choose to quit and no longer post, Examiner keeps the articles you have published and the money for those articles rather than paying it to the author.

If you have a large number of articles it feels really bad and stupid to just leave all that behind and any potential money it’s earning. You might as well just flush all your time and money down the toilet at that point.

Examiner.com is going the way of eHow as far as bugs and glitches go, too. Not only do we get a severe pay cut, about 40%, but we have to deal with broken publishing tools, poorly laid out pages with Examiner 2.0 and broken earning reports.

Examiner may never go the way of the dodo like eHow did due to the need for writers to actually run their ‘news reports’ that are very rarely news, but at this rate, people might be jumping ship pretty fast.

If you have only a few articles, or haven’t started for Examiner.com yet, then run. Turn tail and run as fast as you can to another site that plays more fair with its writers. Yes, you may leave behind a few articles, but it’s better to get out now rather than be saddled with Examiner.com when they lower their pay even more.

Ever since I started working for Examiner.com they have been doing update after update after update on their publishing tool in attempts to make it more user friendly. The updates have successfully made some things easier to use - like posting at all - but has also made some things an absolute nightmare to do - posting multiple pictures or strategically positioned pictures.
Well, Examiner.com has up and decided to change the entire publishing tool and is going to Examiner.com2.0. The official release date for this is unknown, but Examiner does keep sending e-mails that writers need to back up their work if they have any articles that are in unpublished mode.

Furthermore, the e-mails have stated that any articles that were done using the current publishing tool(s) - there are two - will not be able to be updated ever again. The articles will migrate with you to 2.0 but they will remain as they are forever. This sucks a bunch considering how many articles can be repeatedly updated with the publication of a few more articles.

The solution if you want to continue to be able to write with that article? Back up the article, unpublish it and then publish it when 2.0 is finally released; obviously wait to unpublish the article until the actual date for update is set.

So what's that mean? It means you'll lose your search engine ranking, any backlinks you may have formed, any aging the article has done - as most online writers will tell you, good articles age like wine, not milk.

So you'll have to start from scratch. So... does that article need to be continuously updated or can you abandon that article to leave it as it is and just make something new with the same information once 2.0 is released?

I have a few articles that list a variety of body piercing types, such as this article about curved barbell body piercing jewelry that I used to update everytime I added a new article about a specific body piercing type listed. Rather than losing all the aging it has done, as it was published almost a year ago, I'm just going to let it fall to the wayside. It will continue to bring in whatever it brings in and I'll make a new article to update if I feel I need it.

When eHow began the merger with Demand Studios, they claimed that you had a 7 day window to keep publishing on eHow - April 13. This then changed to be a 7 day window from the time you received your login information from Demand Studios (and if you didn't get accepted or already wrote for DS you had until April 13).

My 7 day window is apparently still very wide open as I have received no e-mails at all from eHow about this merger.

What I have received is deletion e-mails from eHow. I've had articles deleted before - back when they first started making guidelines but didn't bother to tell the writers what the guidelines were, but I have not lost an article in many, many sweeps now, even when I did publish something new.

But suddenly, when I began publishing within the new time frame, my new articles are being deleted left and right despite following guidelines - I'm well aware that they follow guidelines as I'm one of the most anal people about the guidelines.

One was a recipe - A Wiccan Acne Recipe. I don't see how a recipe can be anything except a how to article; you do this, this and this and you get this. It was reportedly an 'opinion'. I'm not sure how a recipe can be an opinion.

The second was how to write a letter of complaint. I looked at a letter I had written, went paragraph by paragraph on what should be said and how it should be said. I even told how to mail it. It was "missing steps". Maybe I forgot to tell them to pick up a pencil and write on a piece of paper. Would hate you to try writing all that with your finger.

Another was a legal article - Creating a Perform or Quit Notice - done in the same vain as a few other legal articles I have written. It was said to be 'poorly written'. Knowing I don't write poorly and that I don't make many grammar and spelling mistakes I find that beyond impossible to believe.

eHow, if you didn't want new content, you could have just said so. You didn't have to make up weird excuses for deleting.

This also explains the perpetual stuck in draft/unavailable mode that everyone suffers as soon as they attempt to publish something on eHow right now. They're saying it's a 'publishing bug' but by now, we should all know 'publishing bug' is code for, "We'd rather you just went away, but we can't tell you that and save face, so we'll make up excuses for why there are 'problems'."

Sorry I missed this at the beginning of the week when it was published. eHow's forum is harder than ever to navigate with all the bugs and with almost no communication - other than poor, lone Julie, eHow community manager, trying to put out fires left and right - I wasn't really looking for anything like this.

This was posted on Monday, March 15. So keep in mind, the end of this week means March 19, Friday, when eHow staff gets off work.

Photo Upload Issue (problem with image upload tool and photos disappearing from articles) - fixes to be released by the end of this week

I Did This (problem with editing IDT or Save & Preview) - fixes to be released by end of this week

Unavailable Article Status (excluding Unavailable Status due to edits) - fixes to be released by end of this week

Edit/Publish Article then page that keeps redirecting - fixes to be released next week

So tomorrow is the end of the week and I have not seen any of the 'by the end of this week' fixes rolled out. So that means tomorrow, probably right before they get off work, they're going to try to roll out the three patches to the system. Whether it works, they probably won't care until they get into work again on Monday.

Last week, I did a post about Mahalo wanting freelance writers, specifically how to writers from eHow.

Well I got an e-mail at 1:00 AM on March 4 (six days after publishing) saying my task was rejected. Apparently all tasks need to have citations within the text - which was not stated anywhere on the how to make a how to page. It only said to use them if they were not common knowledge - or if you were quoting something - and everything I wrote was common knowledge that can be found on dozens of websites, on any handout from a body piercing shop and a variety of videos on youtube. You do not need to cite things like that because they are so widely said, they are common knowledge.

I really can’t say I’m broken hearted; after putting all that work into the page and knowing that I was going to be paid only M$16 ($12 real world) and that it would significantly drop to only $3.75 and $7.50 for any how to tasks after that point, I wasn’t gung-ho to work for Mahalo. In a sense, I’m relieved. Payout on Mahalo is M$150. Do you realize how many how to articles it would take to get that? Even with the 40% revenue share I’d either have to wait about a year to get that much or write a bunch of how to articles for low pay.

The bonus, the review e-mail I got was very polite. It was very specific about what needed worked on and also said what you did well at.

At this point in time, eHow.com is the place to go for how to content. I just really wish they could get their shit together.

If you want to do longer pages like Mahalo wants, I would recommend Squidoo.com. What Mahalo wants in just a how to page would be a great complete lens on Squidoo. If you want to see how pretty my Mahalo article turned Squidoo lens turned out, check my Caring for a New Body Piercing lens.

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.

I was going to use my return to this blog (sorry about the absence, but I was finishing up papers and finals for college) to talk about eHow and how it’s the best place to write that I’ve ever found. I would have, without hesitation, recommended eHow for a new online freelance writer.

Over the last couple months though, my view of eHow has been sliding. Through the bugs, through the whining and moaning all over the forum, through community staff never doing their jobs, I had supported eHow and even been called a ‘cheerleader’ (used in a derogatory way by those who were tired of all the problems).

I’m sick of it all though. I have been harassed and stalked through the PM system on eHow and staff did nothing about it except send a “firm warning” to the person not to bother me. I was harassed on the forums by someone who thought it was funny to make comments about killing other people’s pet rats in my thread about mourning the loss of my dead pet rat. Staff reacted by sending a “firm warning” yet again. And the person continued to follow and harass me across the forums anyway with no actions taken by staff at all.

I have been stalked onto other websites that I write on - the stalker goes by eHow related names (such as eHow Doctor, eHow Stuff, etc.) and it’s most assuredly one of the people I have already reported on eHow for harassing me on their own site first. Staff just let it escalate until I often wonder if I’m going to start receiving letters in my physical mailbox and not just my e-mail inbox.

And it’s not just that; everything about eHow ticks me off recently. The publishing tool is broken, the staff is so out of touch that they actually had to ask how we post our articles - wizard mode broken into 4 steps or the expanded mode all on one page. Well if they paid attention to anything that was said for months and months and months, they’d know that wizard mode doesn’t work 99% of the time. And expanded mode doesn’t work 40% of the time (works less often for some people). And let’s not forget the infinite pending for over a month. And the irony is that the pending review does nothing except check for plagiarism, which was already being done before they implemented this so called review.

There are more bugs than you can count. Don’t believe me? Check my eHow Experiment page. I used to keep a nice little chart of all the bugs that were going on, as well as possible fixes and workarounds or just saying it wasn’t a bug (in the case of article deletions), but now, I can’t even keep up with them. I’d need an entire webpage dedicated just to the publishing related bugs. Yes, the one thing eHow is supposed to do - allow freelance writers to publish content - has been broken for months on end with staff running around like chickens with their heads cut off, first saying they didn’t know, then saying they were aware of it, then asking for more details (how many more details can we give you after 2 or 3 months of reporting it in great detail?) and now asking stupid questions about how we usually publish. As if we can publish!

Well, this went on longer than I meant for it to. The tipping point was, sadly, a piddly little “I did this” contest for pumpkin carving. I spent more than 24 hours skinning a pumpkin - how many people actually do that, right? I should get so many points just for uniqueness - and cutting off the bottom of it to form a jaw line and a variety of other things. There were other really awesome ones as well, such as a Frankenstein(I can't find the link right now, because eHow has no idea how to run their I Did This section properly) done by skinning as well. Or this pumpkin eating a pumpkin.

What won though? Oh, a really pathetic and simplistic Darth Vader. And one of the runners up? A kitty. Yes, a really lame kitty.

Good job eHow. You fail, so hardcore.

So, if you want to risk the bugs and the annoyances and the maybe you can, maybe you can’t publish ever or right now or this minute problem, then eHow is great. The money is there and it’s good. But would you put up with a normal day job that allowed other employees to harass you, that allowed the payroll to not work properly, that allowed updates not to happen on a regular basis without explanation, that allowed the one thing it’s designed to do to not work for months? No? Didn’t think so.

For more about eHow check my Unofficial eHow Q&A over here or see my experiences for my first year over here in My eHow Experiment.