In a recent post about the pay scale for online writing, I mentioned websites that put up articles by anyone who wants to contribute, and pay according to each writer’s number of hits. I call them communal writing sites, since they don’t seem to have an official title yet. There’s revenue sharing site, but that includes blogs that sign up with Google Ad Sense and other advertising plans. Allvoices (recently proven an official scam) calls themselves citizen-powered media, but the Internet itself is citizen-powered. In any case, these kinds of venues are popping up every day. There’s The HUB, Associated Content, and Environmental Graffiti, to name just a few. More can be found here. Which are for real I don’t know, but you might check in this article about scams.
Since money’s no guarantee on these sites, they lure inexperienced writers with over-the-top hype like this:
Benefits of joining Allvoices:
1. Exposure – instantly publish your news and content around the globe
2. Engagement – ability to engage and reach others from more than 167 countries
3. Global reach – social networking and sharing features to connect with others inside and outside the Allvoices community
4. Control – You own your content which enables you to post/promote it on other sites and link or cross post your content from your blog or external website
You have to be pretty inexperienced and hungry to get excited over this kind of garbage. Anytime a company offers writers “exposure” as in, “No pay, but great exposure,” I run the other way.
A few years ago, knowing nothing about communal sites, I decided to try one, and signed on to The HUB. In addition to paying by number of hits, they rate writers according to some mysterious system that includes, among other criteria, level of participation in “the HUB community.” I opened at Number 62, but soon jumped past 80 merely by posting in the forums.
The process of putting a post up on the HUB is much more involved than WordPress (You Are Here): each block of text, visual image, or video must be pasted into a separate capsule. The first few times I went through this painstaking process, I ended up with ads in the middle of sentences. I was less than thrilled.
After putting up a couple of posts, I became obsessed about numbers – mine and everyone else’s. I wondered what people with higher numbers were earning, and found myself constantly comparing, which soon gave me a super-sized knot in my stomach. I was filled with the anxiety of competition and the terror of not measuring up. I was definitely not enjoying the experience, but I told myself to give it more time, at least to see if I could make some money.
I wrote a post about Joni Mitchell focused on Shine, her latest album, in which I referred to several of her other albums. While I wrote it in less than an hour, the HUBbing process took a good three hours. I ran into 
all kinds of glitches, and couldn’t get it to look the way I wanted. As I entered the fourth hour, I decided it would have to do, even with an ad for a tattoo parlor smack in the middle of the first paragraph. Half an hour after HUBbing, I received an email from the staff: they censored the post because it was “overly promotional.”
I can understand not wanting writers to use the HUB as a way of drumming up business for friends’ artistic or entrepreneurial endeavors. But did these guys notice who I was writing about? I mean, Joni Mitchell doesn’t need me or the HUB to sell her CDs. Did they bother to read the actual content, or did my enthusiastic buzzwords trigger the censors?
After firing off a note telling them they were insane, I read the rules, and figured out the problem: I had put in “too many links to the same site”— to Amazon, where I’d linked all the albums referred to in the post. But we were supposed to be making money from Amazon sales on the HUB. It turned out that it doesn’t matter where the link goes —any HUB post with a lot of links to the same place is automatically bumped.
The irony was, I’d noticed a lot of HUBbers shrewdly promoting their business ventures: one touted their posts as fitness advice, and linked up to his own exercise book. Another wrote about ethnic cooking with a link to her self-published cookbook. You get the picture. Yet I was unHUBbed for promoting Joni Mitchell’s music!
I’ve been censored for dirty talk, I’ve been censored for radical politics. This was the first time I’d been censored for promoting music. Thus ended my venture not only on HUB, but with all communal writing sites.
These sites advertise on Craigslist; by now I can smell one a mile away. I imagine some people are earning money on them, but they have to be working their butts off and doing the competition dance at warp speed. More likely, novice writers are using these sites for the exposure, which is what they tout as their big benefit. For some people that’s fine: the teenage son of a friend of mine writes a column on Bleacher Reports. BR isn’t exactly like other communal writing sites; for one thing, they pay nothing. No revenues, no point systems – although you can become one of their “featured writers” if you prove popular. Because I only began writing about baseball a few years ago, and I’m no expert on the game, I didn’t mind writing for free in this case, and did a few 
pieces for BR myself. But since I write primarily about the Yankees, I didn’t get many readers, and was soon bored.
Ever since the dawn of the Internet, everyone, including me, has been trying to figure out how to make money here. Because of that, it’s an easy place to get scammed and/or exploited – and those who’ve figured out how to get rich online are, unfortunately, the kind who seem to be good at exploitation.
If I’m going to write for free, I’m sticking to my own blogs, where there’s no anxiety and I control everything: content, timing, appearance, comments. To me, that’s the joy of blogging. I can promote Joni Mitchell. I can promote myself. Maybe I’m not getting rich on my words — but neither is anyone else.
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- Writing job scams: a quick guide on what to avoid (writtenwings.wordpress.com)
Thanks for the tips. Not that i’d try to write for money. I’m too lazy.
You’re right–it takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears to try to earn a living by writing. Here’s one of my favorite statements about it:
Better go down upon your marrow-bones and scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together is to work harder than all these, and yet be thought an idler by the noisy set of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen the martyrs call the world.
–W.B. Yeats