My Personal Experience with Factoidz

I joined Factoidz due to the solicitation of various ‘Shills’.

A Shill is a term used to describe persons who lure others to a venue, a competition, a game, and most famously, a circus.

A Shill is virtually or literally employed to bring others into the scheme.  S/he is a person ‘just like you’ who ‘wins’ the competition or game, who receives benefits from the investment, and who makes lots of money writing for a particular site.

There were five major Shills for Factoidz. These were persons who joined with the owner, M.Q.,  to create the site. They all held ‘Mod’ posts and were the kind of loyal expendables that you will always find acting as Shills.

Shills run to other writing sites and say; “Hey! Do you know about Factoidz? It is a great site and really pays! Join now…” and put down their ‘reference number’. So you’ll see something like www.factoidz.com/1245.

The last number means that the person who sucked you in will get payment for your body if you join.

I joined the site and was told that I would be a ‘member’.  As a member I could read anything I wanted and leave comments, and that my first ten submissions would be carefully checked.  If they were good enough, I’d be promoted to ‘writer’.  As writer I would be paid. If I were very good, I’d be a ‘Staff Writer’ which meant that my work would not be moderated and I’d be paid more.

The payment amounts looked good, although I wasn’t excited about writing ten items for free.

Obviously, any revenue which my first ten items would get would go into the owner’s pocket.   I assumed that it was this rip off which enabled the site to pay so well.   After all, if I wrote an item than made $100 by views it would go into the bucket and the other Writers and Staff Writers would share it;  or it would go into M.Q.’s pocket

There was a length requirement, an authority requirement, and images demanded for each submission. I liked the fact of authorities because there is difference between a member of a site tossing what they believe and proving what they write is true.

(A little aside; on this site if you take the facts as is/where is and attribute you will still be slapped for plagiarism. Hence if you read that “ The Klingons decided to destroy all Tribbles and dropped 123 smash up bombs on the 20th day of Metash, in the year 2234..” you can’t repeat that quote or those facts, without being slapped down. You would have to post, “To get rid of the Tribbles, they were bombed by the Klingons.” Sure, not as strong, not as accurate, but hey! Not plagiarism.)

I spent a lot of time reading other items on Factoidz before writing because they were of such high quality. Everything on that site that was placed on the front page were first class.   I often would log on, spend an hour reading before posting.

At my finest style, I wrote my items for Factoidz.

I was moved to ‘Writer’ after only five items, and then quickly to Staff Writer.

To say I made $100 a month on Factoidz was low. At the time of my joining, I was writing professionally, had a full time job, participated on a number of other sites,  as well as having a very busy life. I would say I published once or twice a week at the most.

I was always paid, and would say, then, that Factoidz was a great site… until.

Whether the owner wanted more money or what, there was a change.

The first change was the ‘rating’ of ‘low value/high value’  articles.   For no apparent reason, your item could be labeled ‘low value’ so you would get far less pay per view.

The second change was the lying about how many hits an item received.

You might log on and see you had 1632 hits on an article. You’d check again and it was 632. It was clear the site was moving into the realm of Rip Off.   If one didn’t quit or complain then, the Shills would go after you.

You would be attacked by the Shills for an article you posted.

This is what really proved the site had moved into a fraud.

An article I wrote about an American President, using hard factual sources, (not Wikipedia) was attacked by two Shills.

There was not a single word in that item that was not true. To be attacked for ‘anti-American’ sentiment was ridiculous.

I responded, and was slapped down to Writer for my ‘attack’. When I complained, I was dropped to member, all my work confiscated. All my revenue, stolen.

When I went onto Hubpages to write an expose’ of the site, I was followed and attacked by the Shills.

Then, M.Q. stopped paying the Shills.

Yup!

The Owner of Factoidz, M.Q. stopped paying his Shills!  And shut all of the Users out of the site. Just like that. Anyone could log on and read the items, but no one could join, and no one got paid except M.Q.  Articles were earning, the writers were not!

There was a complaint made to an American Law Enforcement Agency which instantly investigated, and Factoidz was closed.

Many of the items were moved to Knoji, M.Q.’s new site.   Due to complaints it was he soon changed from a writing site to some ridiculous coupon thing.

However, there was a time Factoidz was the best writing site on the web.