Freelancing at Home

Seekyt.com is no longer in Google's good graces. Apparently a member received a violation notice and failed to report it to the administrator so ads got shut down across the entire site. It's not looking particularly good to get them turned back on considering how small the site is.

It might be time to start looking into alternatives. Seekyt.com was looking like a promising place for a while, but if Adsense doesn't get turned back on I'm going to be abandoning ship. Other ad programs don't pay nearly enough to justify leaving my content on Seekyt if the administrator gets approved with another company.

I'll be giving the site some time to hopefully work things out with Google, but if that falls through I'm going to be transferring articles to Infobarrel.com and elsewhere - not sure where yet, but elsewhere.

If you haven't read the story, please visit here: http://seekyt.com/current-status-adsense-on-seekyt-com/

To your online content I mean. This isn’t some existentialist, religious or spiritual question. I know what can happen to some content. I have stored all my passwords for messenger, e-mail, Facebook, etc. in a safe place so that if I die it can all be accessed and updated/deleted, depending on what the site allows. And that’s all well and good for sites like that, where my existence was minimal at best - I don’t have a big online persona outside of writing content and most people forget I have Facebook or other things (I do too) - and I don’t earn money on them.

But what happens to your content on the sites you write for? What happens to the income generated on that content after your death?

You might be surprised to find out that with online writing, your content and earnings may transfer to the site you submitted to if you didn’t give a family, friend or other loved one the passwords for your accounts so they can go and deleted content. And on almost all sites - every site I’ve encountered so far - revenue share content will no longer earn for you or your family; the money on any content not deleted - or content unable to be deleted due to the rights it was sold with - will be kept by the company.

This is all new ground legally and though you can put your online resources into your will, no company online company really has to honor that, as it would require a great deal of things to be transferred including the copyright of the articles, the ownership of the account you wrote under - which is against the TOS of most sites anyway - and the changing of tax information which is usually stable and unchangeable for a writing site.

There’s been a push on eHow.com by members who want to have all these rules changed, who want to be able to transfer writes and earnings in the case of death. This was brought up many months ago but was virtually ignored save for a half-hearted “I’ll take this to legal” that was then never updated. The thread discussing it was then deleted. But the people will apparently not be silenced when it comes to ways to take care of family after death because it was brought up once again. We still have the “I’ll take this to legal” answer with no update, but at least we know it’s not forgotten.

Start fighting for your posthumous rights, freelance writers of the world! If you own your content and especially if you make revenue share profits you and your family deserve to be able to continue to earn on it!

I complained a couple weeks ago now, that I had still not received an official e-mail about any of the changes happening with the WCP on eHow - an e-mail I have still not received - and told the community managers that I believed until I received official notice that they had no way to create a new contract with me - after all, if I was not informed of the new TOU through the accepted means, ie. the e-mails and PMs everyone else received then I had not been official notified. I also pointed out that my 7 day publishing window should not begin until I received this notice, same as everyone else.

This is community manager, Rich's response:

In the meantime, you may keep publishing until you receive the official notification that states that your transition is complete and your 7-day window will start once you receive that email. Thank you for your cooperation. -Rich

I logged in Thursday to post an article only to discover my publishing ability was turned off. Mind you, I have still received no official news of the eHow WCP suspension from eHow, nor did I ever receive an e-mail or PM - which were repeatedly promised to me - giving me the dates of my 7 day window.

Basically, I was lied to. Rich's word on that forum acts as the word of eHow. By telling me I would be able to continue to publish until the e-mails were received as promised means a new contract was entered into. That it's in writing makes it even more solid. Now, if this had been inaccurate or if Rich didn't have the authority to make such a promise then I should have received an immediate response saying this was incorrect - along with the correct details. Instead, I'm now being ignored when I ask for information.

eHow never notified my of changing contracts, though apparently I will be agreeing to them if I continue to use the site, and I was not informed of anything about the DS and eHow merger in an official manner - and really, official is all that matters; that I heard from a friend who heard from a bird doesn't really cut it in court, eHow.

Okay, you hopefully know what is happening with the eHow and Demand Studios merger (if not, follow the link and I explain what is going on). But what does this merger mean for everyone who was pre-accepted or who separately applied for and was accepted to Demand Studios?

Some questions I gave to Remi, DS Community Manager, and her answers. (These are paraphrases, not quotes).

Q. Previously there was a 5 year limit for revenue share in Demand Studios. What is it now?

A. There is no longer a limit for revenue share. It was lifted entirely.

Q. Is the secret algorithm used for earning on eHow the same algorithm that is used for Demand Studio revenue share?

A. The same algorithm is used for Demand Studio and for eHow.

Q. Will current articles on eHow continue to earn as usual and will I be able to check them?

A. Yes. Your account will be accessible to you and you can check up on articles published with the WCP.

Q. If I decide to delete content from eHow in say, 2 months, will I still be able to?

A. Yes, you will be able to delete or edit articles that were published under the WCP.
And there you have it. Those were the only questions I really saw fit to ask. To me, this isn't a bad thing. I think eHow became severely overrun with people who posted spam articles, junkie articles, PLR articles (oh, you probably know who I'm talking about), etc. that they just decided to do away with the WCP all together.

By making people send in a resume to work for Demand Studios - have I mentioned I was denied twice by Demand Studios when I applied myself? - they will cut down on the number of really bad writers or those who just want to game the system. And no more clickfraud rings! Okay, maybe there will be, but I bet it will be easier to catch.

Am I upset? You bet'cha. They went about this wrong in so many ways, including having an article sweep today, which has me almost crying with laughter even though I haven't lost anything, and the brunt of the anger people are feeling could have been relieved by just being honest before. But what's done is done and I don't think this is a bad move for eHow.

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.

Last week, eHow released a thread on the forum where a community manager, Julie, gave some dates for eHow site fixes.

Well nothing was fixed at the end of the week as the timeline said. And when I say nothing, I mean, absolutely nothing was fixed as promised.

So the date on the thread was changed to be for the week of the 22nd, and all the issues and their promised fix dates were left exactly the same:

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

It's Friday once again and not a single one of the 'by the end of the week' fixes are out.

So I guess they'll just be changing the date and leaving everything the same as before. Last I checked, by the end of this week is supposed to mean by the end of the first week you posted it, not by the end of whatever new date you choose to put on it. At least hold yourselves accountable, eHow, for fixing one thing on the 'by the end of this week' list.

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.

And after yesterday's post you thought I was going to be done talking about eHow, didn't you? Actually, so did I. Or at least I hoped I would be. But, Rich, the eHow community manager, came in with an answer to the eHow UK redirections not functioning at all on slower internet connections. From Rich:

Re-directs are a non-issue whether whatever connection you are using. It maybe a little bit slower to process if you're on a 56K connection, but generally speaking that's what happens when you don't have high-speed internet.

But wait! That doesn't seem to answer the question I posed at all. I witnessed, with mine own eyes, the redirection not working on a slower computer. It wasn't that I needed to wait a few minutes longer for the redirection to work - and even if that were the case, why would someone wait for a redirect that they don't know is coming when they are staring right at the whole article on their screen, complete with money making ads (money making for eHow, not for the freelancer who wrote it, since we aren't compensated for eHow UK viewer use). The redirection just timed out! It stopped trying to redirect at all because both the redirect and the computer were too slow. So that left me just staring at the article on the UK page.

So Rich has once again stuck his foot in his mouth and told a bald face lie. Non-issue, my ass! I witnessed the issue firsthand, so don't try to pull the wool over my eyes.

It's always so easy to say something is a non-issue when it's your company stealing those extra dollars and cents all year long.

As promised, a complete copy of messages and conversations I had with Rich, eHow's community manager, about the eHow UK scam and the fact that my posts asking about compensation were being deleted.

This is a direct copy and paste from a PM, so please read starting at the bottom to get the messages in order.

---- Tara Swadley wrote on Sunday Jan 24 2010 at 3:13 PM because he wanted
to ----

I know what I read. You do not want me bringing up the FACT that
you are erroneously deleting things. Got it. Will do.

---- Rich - eHow
Community Manager wrote on Sunday Jan 24 2010 at 3:10 PM because he wanted to
----

To: Tara Swadley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your forum post


Now Tara... you know what I meant.

---- Tara Swadley wrote
on Sunday Jan 24 2010 at 2:59 PM because he wanted to ----

To: Rich -
eHow Community Manager
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Your forum post

I'm glad
you at least realize it's fact that you're erroneously deleting posts.

---- Rich - eHow Community Manager wrote on Sunday Jan 24 2010 at 2:51
PM because he wanted to ----

To: Tara Swadley
Subject: Re: Re: Your
forum post


Look Tara, ask the question, but do not bring up the fact
that I'm erroneously deleting posts. You've been with us for some time and you
know I like you being part of the community, however, I have my reasons, and in
my opinion you're creating unnecessary attention. This is my final warning. If
you don't agree, then I'm sorry, but it's part of my job to keep order on the
forums and if I need to put a penalty I will do so. Thank you for your
understanding.



Best,

Rich

---- Tara Swadley
wrote on Sunday Jan 24 2010 at 2:32 PM because he wanted to ----

To:
Rich - eHow Community Manager
Subject: Re: Your forum post

But you
DID delete my post without reason. Whether it was noted or not isn't important.
The fact is you're trying to censor those who want answers. That IS an abuse of
power and it's not damage control. It's stirring the pot.

I was
previously calm about this issue just waiting. That was my first question and it
was still calm. By deleting my calm question you're raising my ire to the same
level as those who were previously attacking you.

---- Rich - eHow
Community Manager wrote on Sunday Jan 24 2010 at 2:25 PM because he wanted to
----

To: Tara Swadley
Subject: Your forum post


Tara,

The forum post you made has been noted and there other posts similar to
what you have sated, but by bringing up the fact that I'm misuing my powers and
deleting forum posts without reason is not necessary and will be deleted. Once
again, please do not do this, or I will have to enforce a penalty against you.
Thank you for your understanding.



Best,

Rich

Rich is very set on silencing me when I want to mention either a lawsuit possibility or when I call him on the fact that he is erroneously deleting some messages (not all, but some that offer questions he - or the eHow legal team - doesn't like).