Tuesday, May 3, 2011

A Few Bad Apples . . .

After the Google Panda update, many revenue-sharing sites are changing the way they do business. Xomba no longer allows you to link to your own work, and now TheInfoMine and MyGeoInfo are closing their doors to new writers, and asking writers with less substantial bodies of work to move their articles to another site. Since these two sites had a responsible and responsive admin, and an 85-90% revenue share in favour of the author, the loss of these two fine sites is devastating to the revenue-sharing community. More sites, I am sure, will follow suit.

At some point you have to decide if you are in the making money online game for a quick buck or for the long-haul of providing valuable content or curation to the public. If you've been in the former camp, I encourage you to change, as you are spoiling the revenue-sharing sites for the rest of us writers, who work hard to come up with creative, original content. Your "Cheap ________ for Sale for Under $100" articles will not stand the test of time, and eventually you and the other authors of those articles will find themselves without any income as readers, search engines, and site admins catch on. In order to make revenue-sharing work in the long run, you have to take the high road. The site admin at TheInfoMine/MyGeoInfo recently emailed me and said, "I wish I had a hundred ethical writers like you." I think he's speaking not only for himself, but for all revenue-sharing site administrators, who had hoped to build a community of people willing to share their knowledge for free. It's time to grow up and stop gaming the system; otherwise, most, if not all, of the revenue-sharing sites will collapse under the mountains of spam and junk articles.