February 7, 2006

HubPages, a better Squidoo?

Michael Arrington

19 comments »

Paul Edmondson, the founder of HubPages in Berkeley, California, thinks Squidoo is onto a good idea, but needs improvement in a number of areas. And he’s in the process of building something he says will be significantly better, both for publishers and readers.

Squidoo has basic tools for publishers to create “lenses”, which are topic specific websites. For example, see this site on Web 2.0 by Joshua Porter. The idea is to allow an expert to create a site, combining static/evergreen and refreshed content. Better sites bubble to the top and publishers have the ability to earn a share of advertising.

But Squidoo is stingy when it comes to sharing money with publishers. They split profits, not revenue. And they give 5% to charity before splitting profits.

We divide up the money we receive in a very public way. First, we pay our bills. That’s direct out of pocket expenses like rent and servers and salary and benefits expenses (our CEO doesn’t take a salary, and neither does our board of directors). Then, with no other deductions, we pay 5% of our post-expense revenue directly to the charity pool, 50% directly to our lensmasters and retain the rest to pay off investors and employees.

HubPages is taking a different approach. They are promising more tools to create and promote sites, as well as an aggressive 50/50 revenue split with publishers.

Hubpages purpose is to provide easy-to-use tools and traffic to help anyone to produce content and monetize their knowledge by creating webpages. There will be monetization programs to choose from consisting of products, advertisements and lead generation tools that each person can easily incorporate into their pages. Hubpages will split revenue with the content creator. The pages are organized in the Hubpages website based on algorithmic quality index that promotes the best pages throughout the hierarchy (based on tags) of the website. Each author will earn a reputation score called a HubScore that can be referenced to meter the quality of the content by an author.

Hubpages will be positioned to take advantage of the significant numbers of new web content providers that want to supplement their income through content like many people do on eBay by selling goods.

The Hubpages team is founded by three guys out of Microsoft that were part of the successful startup MongoMusic. The team includes Paul Edmondson, Jay Reitz, and Paul Deeds. Most recently, Paul Edmondson was the Group Product Manager for MSN Entertainment, Jay Reitz was the Development Manager, and Paul Deeds was a developer in Windows Media Internet Services.

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Comments

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Halley Suitt

February 7th, 2006 at 10:38 am

This sounds great. I’m happy to hear Gather.com, Squidoo and now Hubpages all want to put money in the pockets of writers.

But my question remains … how much money? And are all writers created equal? Are all writers equally talented and prolific?

We’re looking at the same issue (paying writers) at Top Ten Sources, especially since a bunch of us started as bloggers, so we’re more than sensitive to promises about writers making money. Still I would rather underpromise and overdeliver on this “make writers rich” business model.

Ultimately, I wonder what kind of exit strategy you can have if you’ve got a labor pool of writers who expect a nice big slice of the revenue pie as part of your value proposition. It reminds me of General Motors and the UAW. If you’ve promised to pay your content creators a pile of riches … in the end, how does that burden your company and who gets to be the paymaster on payday?
Philipp Schumann

February 7th, 2006 at 11:38 am

In particular, I see more linking and less writing on most lenses. Pay for writers? What writers?

The whole Squidoo-and-similar concept seems a step backwards in a web 2.0 world to me. Yes, it may be “user generated content”, but only by one user (’lensmaster’)—hence, I don’t really see the read-write web in that, and the conversation.

So here we have some weird mixture between an aggregator, a dictionary and a link list. We also have the “lensmaster”, in summary: an editor, a channel, and consuming masses?

That sounds very 1999…
Ted

February 7th, 2006 at 11:44 am

How many people tried the revshare model in the 90s? A lot. How many succeeded? None, that I can think of.

There are inherent problems with this model because at the end of the day, you’ve got people being paid a very small amount of money to product what needs to be very valuable content.

There are tons of good, knowledgeable writers around who may try this, but once they see the paltry returns, they’ll have no incentive to keep producing content. Then you have the people who don’t mind the low pay because no one, and I mean no one, is going to pay them for their insights anyway– because they don’t really have any.

Sure, there may be a few good pages in the network, maybe even hundreds. But you need tens if not hundreds of thousands of great pages to make this work.
Vaibhav Domkundwar - iNods.com

February 7th, 2006 at 12:30 pm

Mike, isn’t this more Web 1.0? Isn’t this just a better version of Geocities? Also what is the incentive for a writer to write on HubPages or Squidoo instead of writing her own blog and having transparency to the revenue streams - however big or small it may be.

The concept of asking people to come to a centralized site, without any upside from a community angle, is so yesterday. This concept can best evolve in a decentralized manner with a aggregator providing a robust search across them. This is precisely what we aim to drive towards at iNods.

It will be interesting to see more thoughts on HubPages considering the severe criticism Gather gathered
Jonathan Grubb

February 7th, 2006 at 12:31 pm

>How many people tried the revshare model
>in the 90s? A lot. How many succeeded?
>None, that I can think of.

There were a lot of failed “pay users to surf” concepts in the 90s that failed, but there were also a few successful revenue sharing concepts. A few that come to mind:

Amazon shares revenue with website owners who drive traffic to them.

Ebay shares almost all revenue with users.

Craigslist lets users keep all revenue.

Blogger (and most other blog tools) share ad revenue.

I think About.com still shares revenue.

Of course all the ad networks share revenue. And search engines are basically a revenue sharing mechanism.

>There are tons of good, knowledgeable
>writers around who may try this, but
>once they see the paltry returns,
>they’ll have no incentive to keep
>producing content.

The same could be said of blogs in general, but the fact is that people have many different motivations to produce content. Some want to make money, some want to build a reputation, and others are satisfied to contribute to the discussion on a topic they care about.
John

February 7th, 2006 at 12:48 pm

Squidoo is incredibly ugly with the yucky squid and bright orange pages. But beyond that, think about it, it’s really a dressed up version of the very first “home pages.” A little text content, links to other sites of interest, links to Amazon books of interest, it’s mostly static — and really, it’s SO 1990s.
Ted

February 7th, 2006 at 1:17 pm

Sorry, I should have written more clearly. I was talking abotu rev-share when it comes to content creation. There were quite a few that launched, looked promising, but ultimately failed because of the incentive problem I tried to explain above.

You’re right though, I had forgotten about About.com, although I believe that About, even when it was called (what did it used to be called? I must be getting old) something else, paid a flat fee and then added rev share on top of that. They used the flat fee to attract people who had the most experience and could be relied on to constantly generate good content.

The same could be said of blogs in general, but the fact is that people have many different motivations to produce content. Some want to make money, some want to build a reputation, and others are satisfied to contribute to the discussion on a topic they care about.

I don’t quite agree, because blogs by their very decentralized nature are always going to have a different, far wider demo then those who get paid to contribute to a rev-share ad supported website. Squidoo, eHub, etc. are trapped in a space which attracts those seeking profit, but lacking skills to montetize it any other way. Blogs are different because there is no centralized motivation. And remember that 90% or more of blogs are total crap with very limited long-term value. For a Squidoo to be successful, it needs to bring that 10% into the fold, but I don’t see a way they can do it that would make sense economically.
anon

February 7th, 2006 at 1:40 pm

I think the most successful model is one that doesn’t reward the writer: Wikipedia. Squidoo seems more like a gimmick than a business OR community, and hard to imagine this one is any different. Take a look at the upkeep… I bet most lenses have already begun to fizzle. Alexa says the traffic is certainly flat. Michael probably has a better idea here (at least with classifieds)- a user who already owns a blog should be able to develop content and agree to have it republished in a central source. That’s the only smart model here. It will be the technology company, not he social one, that can win this.
Michael Arrington

February 7th, 2006 at 2:22 pm

#8 - I agree 100%, and I am planning a writeup on Squidoo. I’m just waiting to talk to them, which they have asked that I do by email due to time issues on their side.
Klim

February 7th, 2006 at 8:22 pm

That is probably the worst beta page I have seen in some time. The logo passable, but the rest is just too slapped on. It has no feeling of something fresh and uplifting.
Roger Jennings

February 9th, 2006 at 9:13 am

I doubt if many participants in the Squidoo beta create lenses in anticipation of shared ad revenue (if or when the site goes into “production” status). I think of Squidoo as a small-scale, one-way Wikipedia. Thus, I question the feasibility of the Gather, Squidoo and, potentially, HubPages business model(s).

Some, but not all, Squidoo lenses are briefly-annotated link collections. The http://oakleafblog.blogspot.co.....ethod.html post has links to four of my lenses with varying amounts of original content. For a comprehensive lens, try http://squidoo.com/TheBlackScholar.

I’m looking forward to your “write-up on Squidoo.”

–rj
Lindsay

February 10th, 2006 at 1:50 pm

Does anyone know if HubPages is going to provide some way to receive feedback from readers on what you’ve authored?

This week I decided that I would try out Squidoo for a topic that I’m interested in that is completely out of the realm of what I usually blog about. I thought it would be a good alternative to creating another blog for my other interests.

But now that I have my “lens” public, I feel like it’s a dead end. There’s no way to find out how much traffic it sees (other than the ambiguous page ranking), and no way for readers to provide feedback as comments or in a forum format that would keep the content fresh. It’s just a one-way street and doesn’t really fit into the whole Web 2.0 collaboration mindset.

I’m interested to know if HubPages will offer any community building functionality that’s missing from Squidoo.
Greg Balanko-Dickson

February 10th, 2006 at 9:28 pm

There is no innovation in squidoo and HubPages is getting hype because of the 50/50 split. If yu are a serious author, blogger, writer why the hell would you invest time and energy into a platform that is gonna take 50% and hold your content captive. Every one of these 1.0 and 2.0 so called services retain your content and you cannot export your content.

Recycling old, broken concepts is a symptom of the hype surrounding web 2 and is it a sign of a bubble? Service economies follow a four-year growth, four-year bust cycle - or have we forgot that?
Peter

April 27th, 2006 at 8:31 am

5% for crappy charities? let them all burn.
Jonathan Boutelle

February 22nd, 2007 at 11:35 pm

Hubpages IS a much better version of squidoo. I’ve found some of the lists and other content to be very useful, and it seems to come up reasonably frequently off web searches.

I question whether a lot of people who write amateur content for the web are motivated by money though. Ultimately writing online is more about reputation and recognition than about getting directly paid to write words.

It IS nice the way the site context prods people to write more useful content (e.g. “How to Make a Good Resume”), and less regurgitation (the typical me-too blog post about techcrunch article de jour that blogs are often full of. No offense ;->).