My Personal Experience with Triond

There is nothing bad I can honestly state about Triond.  In it’s early days it was fantastic.  It was good in its middle days, and then, with the introduction of Google’s Panda, it became pedestrian.

Triond

This was the very first online writing site I joined.  Originally, one was paid directly from the site.  Paid every month.  There was no limit, no ‘threshold’.  You saw every single hit you got as you logged on, you saw every single cent you earned.   There was no having to go to this page or having to trust the owner as to how many hits you got.

Triond was honest.  It was the most honest site ever.

Triond had a number of sub-sites so that your item would be published on the site which reflected your topic. If you wrote about Cars or Health or Social Issues or Recipes, your item would appear on a sub-site.   This of course got views for others who were ‘advertised’ on your page.

If you wrote a recipe, your item would be on NoteCook.   To the right side would be other recipes.  This meant, the viewer might read your recipe, then see my recipe on the right, and take a look.

After time, Triond introduced Adsense so you could be paid twice; once from Triond, once from Adsense.  The site helped you get a Paypal account.

Writing on Triond was a joy.

There was a Forum which certain users sort of lived in, and the best thing was to simply read and not comment so that one could see the trends.

It began softly with one user complaining about the rubbish that was being published.  This was after the user had complained about the Mod.

The Mod was a bit ridiculous in her attacks, so was dispensed with to be replaced by an A.I.   This proved even more ridiculous as a person who wrote an item for WebMd was struck down for ‘obscenity’ when she wrote about Breast Cancer.

That left a plagiarism checker and a spelling/grammar A.I.   Writing English not American English, this caused me no end of problems.

However, the characters in the Forum decided to provoke the reinstatement of a Mod by posting ‘fake news’.  The first and most famous was the ‘Suicide of Johnny Depp.’

From first word to last it was fake, and the writer threw in a lot of ‘clues’ to prove it was fake.  It went viral.  He got 1c for every six views, and had 2 million views in a month.  He was paid.   (Do the Math).

The others decided to get together and create a viral item, and that is when they created ‘White House Insider’ over the name ‘Ulsterman’, one of the users.

This came into existence in 2009 and was so popular it got its own sub-site.

Google’s Panda

Google wanted to create its very own writing site.  A NON-PAYING site.   It had to get rid of the paying sites to make the path clear.

At the time, there were a lot of Crap Writers in Hubpages.   These were people who played SEO and Keywords to get to the top of a Google search, although their item said nothing.

Imagine you were going to write about Cricket.  You don’t know anything about Cricket.  So you write on and on and on for one thousand words saying nothing about Cricket, save repeating the word.

“All over the world people are interested in Cricket.   No matter where you go you will hear people talking about Cricket.  You probably have done searches to learn about Cricket.   Perhaps you feel a bit out of the loop because you know nothing about Cricket.  But it is very easy to learn about Cricket…”

This item would score very high on a Search about Cricket, and a user would go to Hubpages to read the item which really said nothing about Cricket.

Google decided to take every single writing site and give them a minus score so that they wouldn’t appear on the first ten pages or so of a Google search.

This attack caused all writing sites to lose views.   A lot of views.   Hubpages fell from Twelve Million hits per month to Six virtually over night.

Triond began to suffer and hits declined and the revenue moved from 1c for 6 views to 1c to 60 views to 1c for 600 views, until it went down.

It went down because of Google’s Panda, not because it ripped off its users, not because of some kind of trick with views and revenue.  It went down because of Google.