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.

News of Google most recent project, Knol, came out late last Thursday without, as far as I can tell, much in the way of press pre-briefings. All the major publications were late to the story. Blogs hit it fast, but had nothing to go on other than the brief blog post put up by Google’s Udi Manber announcing the project. Our initial story on Knol is here.

From a product perspective, Knol is not much different than existing products like Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s a new knowledge base for authors. Anyone, eventually, will be able to write on any topic they choose. Google will provide authoring tools, store the information, allow others to comment and suggest edits, add ads with the author’s approval, and provide traffic via their search engine.

But Knol isn’t really aimed at Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s much more likely that Google is jealously eyeing the massive traffic that flows through its search engine to Wikipedia. As Nick Carr has noted, Wikipedia continues to climb and climb in search results for many top search terms.

More Ad Inventory Needed, ASAP

Wikipedia, a non-profit, has stubbornly resisted any efforts to monetize its pages. Google would kill to supply ads to Wikipedia. Barring that, competing with them makes a lot of sense.

Google needs to grow revenue to support their valuation. And for that, they need ad inventory. It wasn’t surprising when Google started hosting news directly and allowing comments (that = page views). So the idea of them hosting a knowledge base shouldn’t be surprising, either.

Authors have a choice – they can have ads or not. But if they have ads, they can only choose Google. Many authors are going to include ads, and Google will get extra inventory.

Delicious Timing

Wikipedia has caused more problems than just refusing to take Google’s ads. They are also launching a much anticipated search engine this month via their for-profit arm, Wikia (Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hates it when Wikia is called that, but it’s damned hard to tell where Wikipedia ends and Wikia begins sometimes). Google isn’t likely to be particularly scared of Wikia’s new search engine, but it has probably been a little annoying for them to watch all the press about the upcoming “Google Killer.”

Google doesn’t usually pre-announce products before launch. in this case they did. Why? Perhaps as a reminder to Wikipedia that competition can flow both ways.

Anyone Remember Google Base?

As a content management system, Knol is a kissing cousin to Google Base, a classified ad platform that Google launched in late 2005. Google Base has gone exactly nowhere – if anything it’s a spam farm and nothing more. But at the time of its launch the New York Times and others heralded it as a major disruptive force to the classified ads world. Knol may be Google Base with a little more strategic thought applied.

No Conflicts Here, Move Along

Google says that Knol pages will be indexed into their search engine but will have no special ranking. That’s a little bit untrue, since they’ll be hosted by Google and will have the advantage of Google’s hefty PageRank to lift them in search results. And since no one will be auditing Google to ensure that Knol pages are treated just like everyone else, there are bound to be claims of conflict of interest. The fact is, Google will make money from Knol, and so they’ll have a financial interest in moving people to those pages. That makes them less believable in the role of a neutral gatekeeper.

Google is now synonymous with search. Offering Google Knol and putting it in the search results is analogous to Microsoft offering Office for the Windows platform. Sure, anyone can compete with Office, but Microsoft has a natural advantage and finds ways of keeping market share. The Knol team will likely do the same over time.

Wikipedia v. Knol

Wikipedia gets massive support from the community because it’s non-profit. Google can’t compete with that, so they’re focusing on putting the authors’ names in lights and giving them a little cash on the side, too. That should help them pull some heavy Wikipedia contributors over to their project.

Very soon we are going to see a lot of Wikipedia content moving wholesale to Knol. Wikipedia content is basically free to use, redistribute, copy, whatever, under the GNU license:

All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work.

Anyone writing for Knol is likely to at least peruse Wikipedia content before publishing. And if they see anything good, they are at liberty to simply lift and copy it over to Knol, and get a adsense check for their time.

So, in a way, Google has found a way to monetize Wikipedia content after all.

In a poll on Friday, TechCrunch readers narrowly said Google hasn’t overstepped its boundaries with Knol. If Knol is a success, those results may be a little different a year from now. In fact, the more successful Knol is, the more uncomfortable people are going to be with Google as gatekeeper and content provider.

We’re not sure when it launched, but Fred Wilson has discovered that Seth Godin’s Squidoo has quietly entered the people search field with a new product called Squidwho.

Squidwho provides similar features to competitors including Wink, Spock, PeekYou, WikiYou and Zoominfo. Pages include a short biography, Amazon products (where applicable), YouTube videos, Flickr shots, latest news and RSS feed data from appropriate sites.

Each page is maintained my Squidoo Lens Guide and offers the same revenue share model as regular Squidoo pages offer.

It would be easy to question yet another company targeting people search in what continues to be a hot vertical (even Facebook is now offering public people search), and yet by labelling Squidoo Lens’ under the Squidwho label it’s a logical step for Squidoo. The backend is already in place as are the would-be guides to create the information; in effect the new service is more branding exercise than something completely new.

A couple of reports across the net suggest that Seth Godin’s Squidoo is being penalized by Google, most likely due to spam on Squidoo pages.

The reports indicate that some Squidoo pages have seen a 75% drop in traffic, and in other cases have either been removed from high ranking positions on Google, or removed all together.

The service, described last year by Michael Arrington as being Godin’s Purple Albatross, has long been a favorite of black-hat SEO’s looking to drive traffic and gain Google juice for their sites. In more recent times the spam issue has been highlighted by Jason Calacanis, who has written multiple posts on the subject.

Squidoo has recently responded to the issue, however given Google’s crackdown it would appear that Squidoo’s response may be a case of too little, too late. Anyone remotely involved with, or following the SEO community for the last 12-18 months would have been fully aware of the issue (or as some see it, the potential), so if Google is punishing or removing Squidoo pages, Squidoo has no one other than themselves to blame for the situation. Squidoo may also now be on borrowed time; being removed from Google or penalized by Google kills traffic, and Squidoo as a content creator would rely heavily on traffic from Google.

Seth Godin is an exceptional marketing consultant. I’ve read all his books – my favorite is Purple Cow. I routinely bring up his ideas when talking to companies about the best way to get media and early adopter attention: build an exceptional, attention-grabbing product (and if you haven’t, go back and start again). It seems obvious, but most startups don’t think that way. They build something first, then think about the best way to market whatever it is that they’ve built (often by hammering away at journalists and spending whatever capital they have on Google adsense, Overture, etc.).

So when Seth put his name behind a new startup last year, Squidoo, people noticed, and expected one hell of a Purple Cow. The Squidoo idea was simple and easy to explain: allow anyone to build a single page, called a lens, on a topic that he or she is passionate about. The person building the lens, the “lensmaster”, gets recognition as an expert in his or her area of expertise, and cash. Squidoo shares a percentage of profits with its authors.

Now here’s the problem. If Squidoo doesn’t work out as planned, and I don’t think it will, Seth loses more than his time and whatever capital he’s put into Squidoo. He also loses credibility as an expert in product marketing. To borrow the metaphor, Squidoo could become an albatross around Seth’s neck.

Why Squidoo Won’t Work

Squidoo is a mixture of evergreen (static) and refreshed content.

Wikipedia is an excellent example of a site with evergreen content. Sure, its updated and refined, but the idea is that content on Wikipedia is something that is fairly stable and can be linked to reliably, as I did above. Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of authority for just about any piece of content. With all of this authority and inbound links (traffic), a site like Wikipedia could be massively monetized.

Blogs, on the other hand, are the very essence of refreshed content. People go back to blogs every day to see what’s new. Good blogs generate stickiness and repeat customers, which is also a model that can be monetized.

An example of a service that combines evergreen and refreshed content successfully is Myspace, which has both static content about a person and blog-like aspects where people can add fresh content.

Myspace works, however, because it’s a social network, with pages linking to eachother (your friends) in a way that produces massive inter-site traffic and networks-within-the-network. You can surf around Myspace all day just by clicking on a friend chain. People are also passionate about Myspace because the central plot of a page is you – and most people are pretty passionate about themselves.

Squidoo shares little in common with any of the services above because no one person can really be authoritative on a given topic. Wikipedia is group-created, edited and refined content, which gives it the authority it needs to get people to link to it. It’s unlikely that a Squidoo lens on a given topic (when there are a potentially infinite number of other lenses on the same topic) will ever gain that kind of authority. It would be like a Wikipedia with multiple entries on every topic – one for everyone who cared to write one.

The Statistics

To be fair, I have the benefit of hindsight. When Squidoo launched last December I was as excited as anyone about its potential. And Squidoo is still young and may very well reverse its current stagnation. But from what I see now, I wouldn’t bet on Squidoo being what Seth would call a Purple Cow.

I was forwarded a copy of the May email that Squidoo sent out to Lensmasters. It’s quite obvious from the email, as well as the Alexa trend (flat), that Squidoo is not seeing viral growth:

From: xxxxx
Date: May 5, 2006 8:36 AM
Subject: Your First Squidoo Paycheck (the real one!)
To: xxxxx

Hi, XXXXX!

It’s time for your first Squidoo paycheck.

(NB: If you got a cryptic one-liner email from us about this yesterday, please disregard it. Our computers went a little batty!)

We’re just out of beta, and we’re betting no one is going to retire on their lens earnings. But already some of you have earned as much as $30 (dinner for two!). Others have earned about $1. And still others have pooled their money to send thousands of dollars to places like Room to Read, which helps build schools for children in developing countries.

Chances are that what you’re seeing now is just a drop in the bucket. If you’re more interested in spreading ideas and traffic than making money, just send your share to a charity, where every bit counts. Or, check out SquidU’s tips for upping your earnings: http://www.squidu.com/Learning_Library/making-more-money.

Below you’ll find a statement of your money earned from March 1 to March 31, 2006. Probably not on par with the lottery, but at least you can enjoy a cup of coffee on us.

Thanks,

The SquidTeam: Seth, Corey, Megan, Heath and Gil

Squidoo’s Inevitable Destiny

The best lenses are generating $30 or so a month for the lensmaster. A true expert on a topic could generate many, many times that number by creating a blog, along with some static content, and putting up simple Google adsense ads. So top content producers are not going to be heading to Squidoo for the money, ever (Squidoo’s model is set up in such a way that they could never make as much money from a lens as they could on their own). And besides, the blog format just works better for experts – fresh content generates lots of links, which equals traffic and search engine juice.

The only unanswered question is whether or not experts will go to Squidoo even without the financial incentive. Maybe, but Squidoo’s tools are not particularly advanced – self publishing is easy these days.

Squidoo may generate some content creation growth, but I don’t see it generating serious page view growth under their current model.

So, if Squidoo continues to go sideways…how long before Seth starts to distance himself from his albatross?

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.

Sign up for the HubPages beta at Hubpages.com.