There really were ‘Good Old Days’ in online writing.
If you could go back to 2010 you would enter a world of many online writing sites, many online writing paying sites. A world of so many publishing sites which gave you a comfortable platform on which to present your work and made it possible for you to earn real money.
Sites did pay.
Although it might seem fantasy if I tell you that people actually lived on what they earned by writing on line, you might think I’m being ridiculous.
But think of it like this;
You wrote for Factoidz. You get $150 this month for your items.
You wrote for Triond; You got $85 this month.
You wrote for Hubpages, you were paid $75 this month
You aren’t writing all the time, you aren’t killing yourself, you are posting a few items on each site, perhaps three a week on Factoidz, perhaps five on Triond, perhaps three on Hubpages.
You post a few items on other sites, because you have a life.
Yet, you earn every month about $500 writing on line. This is every month. This is your standard earnings. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but this is the basic.
This is how it has been, in your life, since 2007.
This money, more or less, comes every month.
You hear about new sites, and you join and post. You write for Bukisa, Xomba, Squidoo, Wikinut, on and on, a few here and a few there, no worries.
To earn $500 US a month from hobby writing was nothing to brag about, because there were those who earned $1,000 US a month.
Things changed in 2010 with the Introduction of Google’s Panda.
The Panda
There are two sides to the story; however, as a person who follows the money I tend to attribute certain actions more to pocket than prestige.
If Google had not intended to introduce its rip off, no pay, so-called ‘publishing’ site, Knol, then I would be a bit more tipped in the direction that it was all about ‘quality’.
For those who don’t know the story, a little background;
When you do a ‘Search’ you enter a term into a ‘search box’ and the artificial intelligence, (A.I.), that is the computer program which was written to do searches, goes into action. It searches for items which use the term you entered a lot.
The more often the term is used, the more the A.I. ‘likes’ the item, so pushes it to the front of the Search results.
Suppose you entered the word; “Tofu” into a search engine. The A.I. would search billions of items for the word ‘tofu’. The ones which used Tofu the most would be at the front of the search.
Aha!
Enter the Crap Writer. The Crap Writer knows how to ‘play’ the Search engine. The Crap Writer will use the trending term in every sentence.
Example:
“All over the word people are interested in Tofu. You probably are interested in Tofu. Tofu is very popular today. You will find Tofu everywhere…..”
This article will be 1000 words long. It will tell you NOTHING. But, because it uses ‘Tofu’ in every sentence it scores higher than the item which actually describes what Tofu is, how it is made, how it is used.
Considering that Adsense is owned by Google, it is Adsense which is paying for all those views of nothing.
Many writers were aware of this; they’d written great items, and when they did a Google, find themselves way down at the bottom, and the Crap Writer at the top.
Now you could imagine if you had researched Tofu. You had spent an hour or so, reading a lot, taking the information, putting it into your own words, so that you had created a great article that anyone can read and at the end know all about Tofu.
And there is your item waaaaay down on page ten of a Google, and on page one are items which say nothing.
People did complain to Google about this. And Google, because it saw how many online publishing sites there were, decided to create its own.
You would have thought in this supposed; “Do No Evil” motto that Google pushes, that it would create a superior writing site, which grabbed all the best writers.
You might imagine that Google would create a well paying site, have exceptional moderation, and be able to share 50% of all revenue. After all, they are paying themselves. It is their site, their Ads. It is free money.
Instead of Google Adsense having to pay a site to host their ads they pay themselves to host the advertisements companies pay for.
That’s what I thought.
Ha!
Google came up with the greatest rip off ever!
They created Knol, which DID NOT PAY WRITERS. Google made money from selling ads to their company, and paying themselves.
Who would go to a site that didn’t pay when there are sites that do?
To force people to write for nothing, to write for their site, Google created the Panda algorithm. This program pretended to be created to slap down the Crap Writer.
It didn’t.
It slapped down the site.
It labeled Hubpages, Triond, and all the other paying sites as ‘Content Farms’. It set its search engine to push these sites to the back.
For example, if you entered ‘Tofu’ in the search box, the algorithm Google used would go everywhere else before Hubpages.
Think of it as taking an exam.
All the kids who come from this section of town start with -10. If you get all the questions right you score 90% If the kid next to you, who comes from a different section of town gets six questions wrong, he gets 94%.
That is why items published on Content Farms, no matter how good they are, score lower than those published elsewhere.
This is why, today, if you make $30 a month writing on line, that is a lot.
Today, there are few sites that pay, few sites that get over 1 Million visitors a month to view your writing.
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I agree with you that Golden days of writing online and earning has gone.. Lot of improvements has come in with Google adsense over the years.. Most of the sites today does have no matter, but they are earning something for engaging people on their sites for longer time... Google is paying for that reason.. Moderators are in turn passing the portion of their earnings to their most valued members for their contributions