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.

Citizen journalism site Helium has today officially launched its content marketplace after 7 months in beta testing.

We’ve covered the service twice before, once in 2006, then last year when Helium Marketplace first opened its doors. Helium offers two services: a user generated content portal that’s part Wikipedia, part Squidoo, complete with revenue sharing. The marketplace works in a similar way to oDesk, Scriptance and similar services, marrying buyers looking for articles to be written, with writers who can supply original content. Unlike similar marketplace services, individual writers are not selected for each job, instead submitting articles against job requests that can then be voted upon by other users. The publisher then selects the articles they want to use from the rank-ordered list.

During its beta phase, Helium Marketplace signed up over 100,000 active freelance writers. Payments per article range from $20 to over $100, with a 20% transaction fee going to Helium.

Helium is a directory of user generated articles. Anyone can submit an article to any of 24 different categories (arts, autos, politics, etc.). Articles can be submitted directly to channels, entered into contests, or as part of a debate. Since Helium’s launch last October the site has gotten over 69,000 writers and accumulated over 400,000 articles on 60,000 topics.

Over the past couple of months they’ve been running a pilot program for new “Marketplace” service that connects authors and publishers. Today, they’re officially launching the service. Using “Marketplace”, publishers can list bounties for articles they want written. Authors then submit their stories following the publisher’s writing guidelines and compete for the bounty. Publishers can select any of the articles as the winner, although Helium’s peer review ratings help rank the list. Payments per article range from $20 to over $100, with 20% transaction fee going to Helium.

For the pilot they have 14 publishers listing about 10 bounties a piece. In September they expect to have over 1000 publishers on the system.

Massachusetts based Helium launched its user generated article database yesterday and combines original writing with user rankings and profit sharing. It’s an interesting model that’s more compelling that proved more compelling than I thought it would once I started using it. The site is fun to use.

I should disclose that Helium is a sponsor for the upcoming TechCrunch New York Party, though to be honest I wasn’t going to write about them after the site was heavily criticized on Digg yesterday for the quality of the writing. After using it myself though I’ve decided that it’s got more potential than I thought it might. The group rating system in particular could take care of the fact that the site is currently dominated by short, unhelpful text obviously written by people for whom English is a second language. Quality content is already starting to rise to the top.

It’s not expert vetted, for that you’ll have to go to the mainstream media or Citizendium, and it’s not collaboratively written like Wikipedia. It’s not crazy (in a nice way) like Squidoo. It is collaboratively edited in a unique and compelling way.

Here’s how it works. Users are asked to write articles on topics from 25 categories and many subcategories, starting with nothing but a subject line. After writing one article, users are taken to a page to rank other articles in the topic area they just wrote about. Two articles written by other users but with user names removed are placed side by side and the reader is asked which is a better article. Any number of articles can be compared two at a time on a continuum (”article A is much better, or a little better than article B” for example). The best articles are then displayed on the category’s front page, followed by related articles in order of reader ranking.

Users can check the status of their articles – mine on “The best providers for internet phone calls” is currently at #11 out of 21 on the topic. It’s not clear what the revenue split on ads surrounding an author’s content is, but you can monitor your earnings and request payment by PayPal when you hit $25. You can also subscribe to the top articles on any topic by RSS.

Each author has a space to provide information about themselves, followed by a list of all the articles they have written and their rankings on that topic. It’s a well constructed site, if heavy on the ads.

Helium takes up a number of different trends we’re seeing around the web, the aggregate one click ranking reminds me of the Google Image Labeler (a game to build search metadata for images) and paying top users for content creation is clearly something many people are interested in. Question and Answer sites are proliferating rapidly, but the structured topics of Helium have a different appeal.

I think this has some real potential. It’s fun to click through sets of articles and click to rank them. If the ad revenue split is satisfying I can imagine some people jumping ship from places like shill central (PayPerPost) and taking up writing at a site with feedback, community and honesty about writers getting paid.