My Personal Experience with Hubpages

Way back, a decade gone, Hubpages was the writing site.   It paid well, it got the most hits, and there was something about it which inspired me to write a novel on it, chapter by chapter.

The hits were good, the pay was good, the comments, everything about the site was good.

Often, I’d write a short piece on Triond and then, thinking about it, would go to Hubpages, and write a much longer in depth item.

I would not simply touch on a topic, I would explore it, so that I could teach a University class on it.

What began to annoy me about Hubpages was that the folks who got the ‘Top Billing’ at the time, (in those days there was this top banner which featured them, were by and large crap writers.

I know I’ve repeated this term dozens of times.  But always in relation to Hubpages.  For some reason there was either no moderation or slack moderation which allowed long pointless items which said nothing, to be spotlighted.

There were a large number of items of such quality one would find them on a Stumbleupon, but there were also items which came first in a Google Search which were crap.

That is why in 2010 when Google introduced the Panda algorithm I assumed it would bounce those crap items off the front page, but not penalise the good items.

That is not what it did.  It slapped down everyone.  First rate items, items that had been well read were tossed in the dumper just as the crap.

Hubpages never recovered.

It’s first attempt was to invite users to ‘Hop Hubs’, that is that users would rate the items written by others.

Maybe in a perfect world that is good idea, but not on Hubpages.  People would flag great items, just to get them ‘unfeatured’ so that they could write an item using the information in another person’s Hub.  They would not be guilty of plagiarism because they got the item they plagiarised taken from public view.

It would be just as if you had an item on your computer which you had not posted on a site.

That was one of the tricks done by those who ‘hopped hubs’.

This did absolutely nothing at all to upgrade Hubpages.  In fact, it did a great deal to hurt Hubpages.  For with the lowered revenue and the little hubbie pigs flagging their items there was no sense in publishing there, so they left.

Almost ever good writer left Hubpages as if it were on fire.   People began ‘unpublishing’ using Hubpages as a storage facility while they searched for other sites on which to publish, or created their own Blogs.

Hubpages, which had once had Twelve Million Hits a month dropped to Six, then to Three, then to less than one half a million.

Many writers simply stopped writing.  They sat back and watched articles which had once gathered thirty dollars gather thirty cents.

I had liked the site.  But the site ceased to exist as it had been.   It no longer had the hits, the credibility, nor the revenue.  It was a waste of keystrokes.

Today, some attempts are being made to upgrade the site but they are not the kind that inspire, encourage, or offer remuneration.

Simply put, the site doesn’t pay well enough to provoke the kind of work that one would need to do to satisfy the demands.