The online writing community Helium recently ended its 100 day reward-a-thon, during which contributors were rewarded with small bonuses for each article they submitted.
Helium serves as both a directory and marketplace for user generated articles. Writers can earn revenue based on the quality and popularity of each article they submit, though typical payouts tend to be quite small. The reward-a-thon augmented each writer’s pay by $1-3 per article, depending on the quality of the author. In the end, the site says that over 1,000 Helium members earned rewards during the period (only a couple dozen made over $600).
The reward-a-thon was not without some controversy, however. The site employs a complex rating system for each writer, and those that weren’t ranked highly enough were knocked into a lower paybracket or out of the reward-a-thon altogether. An author’s “quality” is determined both by how well their articles are judged, and by how good they are at rating articles written by other contributors. Much of this system relies on the opinions of others, making it difficult for a contributor to maintain a high ranking.
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Great writers, for a great enterprise!
That’s rubbish (about opinions making it difficult to do do well at Helium) I’m a successful freelance writer who earns good money writing online - I made $28 without even trying in that contest (too busy!!) and could have made up to $1000 - my articles are top-ranked - all you have to do is be a good writer that the raters like to read!
Like everything it takes commitment, talent and hard work!
(I share how I learnt this on my website!)
Human generated spam? It’s similar to Mahalo…
DaveS … while I agree Mahalo is spam, I think the more proper comparison is with Associated Content. AC is really designed to garner traffic run adsense around it. Helium does offer a marketplace to match writers with buyers of content.
I still shake my head at how Google allows Jason to link to Mahalo pages from his blog without a nofollow.
Anyway, Helium is a good marketplace with a solid business model not based on adsense revenue.
I’ve heard that some of the writers made more than $1,000. That sounds pretty good to me. They must have paid out a huge sum in total.
I made a good amount of money, and I disagree that people were rated down in order to receive less income from the scheme as is suggested. The commenter of this posting says that the articles gain on the opinions of others, although that is not strictly true. What happens is that raters are given two articles side by side and asked which is the best. Unlike on other sites there is no favoritism, and certainly this would appear to be the most fair way to rate articles, as opposed to being rated by peers who know who you are, as on other websites, where bias comes into play.
I earned a great deal and am very grateful for the opportunity that Helium gave me as a writer to earn and to do something that I love at the same time, which is rare in this life.
Dave Cassel made $900 with 300 reviews, and wrote about his experience.
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This is great news. I actually came by this HubPages Hub with a great way to make big money writing online. Go ahead and take a look: http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to.....l-approach