Catching up with the content site news

Hi. I haven't written in this blog for almost a year. I got tried of tracking and publishing my content-site income. It got to be too much trouble for the small amount of money I was making.  I may start doing it again at some point, on a less detailed scale, but I have to think about that.

For now, I'd like to update what I know about what's been going on with the sites since the last time I wrote here.

Demand Studios
They raised their rates, but they are also looking for more substantial experience, credentials, and degrees in the subject-matter areas they cover.

Helium
They said they will be launching a redesigned site before the end of the year.

Media Piston
Shut down.

Textbroker
They raised rates for their clients, but didn't raise pay for their writers. It seems like a lot of the work has shifted to team orders. On some days, the open order pool is almost empty, although I guess that could change.

WriterAccess
There's more competition for orders now after an influx of new writers, but it's still a good site for good writers.

Writers Domain
A lot of new writers signed on, but they are still accepting more writers periodically. Easy work.

Yahoo! Voices
This is the site that used to be Associated Content. I really haven't kept up with what's been going on there lately, but I've heard some grumbling.

Are you working for any of these sites or any other content sites?  Please share your opinions in the comments below. Pooling information helps everyone.

If you want to comment anonymously, please select Name/URL from the drop-down box and make up a name. That way, if someone wants to reply to your comment, they don't have to refer to you as "The second Anonymous," or "Anonymous at 6:31 p.m."

Rants, raves, warnings, and neutral opinions are all welcome.  Any detail you can provide about what, specifically, you like or don't like about a particular site would be fantastic.

Play nice.  Don't insult your fellow commenters who may have different opinions than yours.

Conference call with Helium CEO Mark Ranalli (Nov. 15, 2012)

(I listened to the conference call so you didn't have to)

Helium member Eszter Vajda interviewed CEO Mark Ranalli (she in her dining room, he in his office, via a Skype-like video system) with 15 people listening.

If you're familiar with Helium, there wasn't much in the call that you haven't heard before.  The main bit of news was that the new site design, long promised to be unrolled by the end of this year, will probably be delayed until next year.


Ranalli also said that they are "not promising" that writing for the helium.com portion of the site will "actually pay your mortgage."  (Someone should tell that to the cheerleaders on the forum, who still insist "the sky's the limit.") Any significant money to be made, he said, is in Content Source, the freelance assignment part of the site.

That's about it as far as news that is relevant to writers. The rest is mostly background information about the company. If you want to watch/hear the whole call for yourself, click on the viewer below:

(Editing to add 11/30/12 -- I just noticed that the broadcast is no longer available.  I don't how for how long it's been gone or why -- I don't know whether it's a temporary glitch, whether Spreecast only stores past broadcasts for a limited time, or whether Helium took the broadcast down for some reason. The conspiracy theorist in me likes the last explanation, but I really have no idea.)

(Editing to add 3/1/13 -- Just heard that the broadcast's disappearance is due to a technical glitch at Spreecast.)

Big changes at Helium and Demand Studios

Photo by Jonas B

I've been a critic of Helium since the disastrous retooling of the site in December 2010, but I have to give credit where credit is due: Helium took a huge step forward this week by announcing plans to publish page views and pay rates. Moving towards greater transparency sets a whole new positive tone for this formerly secretive company.

More after the jump

Helium is also changing the way it calculates revenue share. The company's blog post revealed the old payment formula, for the first time, and it turns out the formula relied heavily on the site's rating system, giving more income to articles with higher ratings. The new revenue share system will pay strictly by page views, which I believe is a lot more fair, considering how flawed the rating system is. In a way, it's an admission that the rating system, the site's original claim to distinction (even the site's name, Helium, referred to the way the rating system was supposed to lift quality to the top), no longer carries much weight.

Pay rates were posted on the forum. They vary by category (topic), and the current range is $1.25 to $2.00 per thousand page views.

Demand Studios seems to be moving in the opposite direction, away from transparency. It soon became clear that the vaguely-worded memo sent out on Oct. 5 meant there would be little work left for writers and editors who weren't assigned to special projects -- and this was after months of the company claiming that the slowdown was only temporary and/or was a technical glitch. Confusion still reigns because after the "buh-bye" announcement, DS then announced a program to help writers new to the site. There are no titles, but they are hiring new writers?  No one seems to know what is going on, but suspicions are running high.

Updates on WriterAccess, CloudCrowd, Textbroker, Demand Studios, and Helium

I recently signed up for a trio of new (to me) sites.  I've been active on WriterAccess and CloudCrowd for a little less than two months, and I've been at Textbroker for a few weeks.

WriterAccess

I've settled in here, writing mostly for two clients with ongoing assignments -- one marketing copy for a catalog, the other news items for law-firm blogs. It's working out very well for me -- it's one of my favorite sites now -- though people who have come in at a lower level (the site assigns "levels" to all writers, which determine the pay rates and the projects they can work on) say they are having trouble finding things to do.  (More info)


CloudCrowd

My second month here is going much better than my first.  I'm doing mostly editing now, with some writing here and there. My score has climbed, I'm getting a bigger choice of assignments, and I'm probably making (roughly) about $10 to $15 per hour.  Best of all, I love to edit.  It relaxes me, and is a great change of pace from writing. (More info | My referral link)

Textbroker

Textbroker is similar to WriterAccess (or perhaps I should say WriterAccess is similar to Textbroker, since Textbroker has been around a lot longer) -- but it pays less. It's a double whammy for me because (1) each level on TB pays less than the equivalent level on WA, and (2) I came in on a lower level -- a 3 -- on TB than I did on WA -- a 4..

Here's a comparison of the pay rates, in cents per word, by level (the WriterAccess pay rates are minimums and often go higher):

If you are looking at this post in the future, you can find current pay rates here: Textbroker pay rates and WriterAccess pay rates.

It's not worth it to me to be writing for one cent per word, but I'm doing some stuff there in the hopes that I might soon be promoted to a higher level.

Also, Textbroker has two advantages: (1) They have a lot of work.  There is always something available.  (2) The work is easy, and the standards, especially compared to sites like Demand Studios, are low. Also, as a Textbroker writer helpfully pointed out to me, if you click on the client number in a job order, you will see what percentage of articles the client sends back for rewrites, and what percentage it rejects.  It's shocking to see how many clients never reject or even ask for rewrites on anything -- which makes writing there totally stress-free.

The downside is that some of the assignments are pointless exercises in keyword stuffing.  This is not a place to practice doing your best work.

In the last few weeks, Textbroker also started a new program, which has "team orders" and "casting calls" -- concepts perhaps borrowed from WriterAccess' "love lists" and "casting calls" -- which enable you to apply directly to specific clients to be put on preferred lists for assignments -- and the clients can pay above your usual rate.  (More info)

Demand Studios

Are the glory days of the $25 eHow Money articles over?  At this moment, as we speak, there are no $25 Money titles available at all. Whether they will come back is anyone's guess, as DS tends to be very secretive about things like this.

Meanwhile, there are lots of new $16 titles for Home & Garden, so I guess I need to try to get in touch with my inner decorator.

I've been doing less at DS this month -- feeling burnt out on the research needed for the finance articles, while they were available. (More info)

Helium

Helium has a new Community Manager, and perhaps because of that, there has been a flurry of new activity around the site, with a lot of pulse-taking of members' opinions.  My take is that they are going to continue along the road towards becoming more of a "fun" site that offers contest prizes rather than consistent or reliable payments. Outside of Content Source (Helium's new name for Marketplace, which is by application or invitation only), the site may be of little use for writers who rely on content writing for income. Still, when reading entries in the "tell us what you think of us" contest, I was struck by how strongly some of the site's active members/volunteers felt that Helium provided them with an online writing home.  (More info)

R.R. Donnelley paid 57 million dollars for Helium

When R.R. Donnelley bought Helium in June, no one outside the companies involved knew how much it had paid.  However, in RRD's quarterly report for the second quarter, filed on August 3, 2011, RRD disclosed that it paid $57 million (in addition to what it had already invested in Helium before).

That's less than the $100 million or so that Yahoo paid for Associated Content, but a lot more than I would have expected

(more after the jump)


From the quarterly report:

On June 21, 2011, the Company acquired Helium, Inc. (“Helium”), an online community offering publishers, catalogers and other customers stock and custom content, as well as a comprehensive range of editorial solutions. As the Company previously held a 23.7% equity investment in Helium, the purchase price for the remaining equity of Helium was $57.0 million net of cash acquired of $0.1 million and included an amount due from Helium of $1.1 million. The fair value of the Company’s previously held equity investment was $12.8 million ....

The operations of these acquired businesses [Helium and RRD's other recent acquisition, Journalism Online] are complementary to the Company’s existing products and services.... The ability to bundle Helium’s content development solutions with the Company’s complete offering of content delivery resources addresses customers’ needs across the full breadth of the supply chain. 

(Hat tip to Chris.)

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