Sunday, February 14, 2010

More About the eHow U.K. Situation

If you talk to anyone who writes articles for eHow, you will undoubtedly hear about the U.K. eHow situation. If you haven't heard much about it, here is the perfect wrap-up of the entire situation. It really is as bad as the article describes. I was happy to get a small payment this month that was to compensate me for the U.K. traffic that stole traffic away from my U.S. eHow articles, but that appreciation lasted only a few minutes.

Based on the last revenue from the site, I believe that a more accurate amount would have been roughly seven times what they paid. Technically, they didn't have to even offer the small amount they did. Or did they?

There are loud cries of eHow fraud and it looks like a class action lawsuit is building. I don't know if it's all just talk, but there's a pretty good case being made in the court of public opinion for bad faith and fraud. I'm not happy with revenue dropping and I'm not happy with the site refusing to answer questions for such a long time.

To top that off, I've had an article stuck in limbo for five days. The "10 minutes" it takes them to approve an article has been stuck at about 24 hours for several weeks now. But, five days? Why should we wait so long? I have one more draft article that I intended to do, and then I think that's it for me for now. eHow will have to seriously clean up its act for me to ever write for them again beyond that article.

If you still like rev share sites and still do well with them, here's an article that I wrote about various revenue share sites and how they work. I recommend all of them except for Bukisa. All of them send me a monthly payment for work that was done long ago- some of them for work that was done four years ago. That's what revenue share sites are all about.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

No Affiliate Links in New eHow Articles

If you have ever used affiliate links to make money online through your eHow articles, the rules just changed. Starting yesterday, no more affiliate links are allowed in new eHow articles. You don't have to take out the old links, and you won't have your old articles deleted for having affiliate links, but no new articles can have them.

Here is the ruling on using affiliate links. The actual rule is the one at the very bottom in tiny print. So, not only is the new rule one that can get your article deleted from the site, it wasn't even brought to the attention of eHow writers. It wasn't emailed to us, and I only heard about it, a day later, from someone else who happened to see it. This is coming on the heels of the whole eHow U.K. fiasco, which I am now hearing is not yet resolved. My eHow payments are actually lower this month, per day, than they were last month when the problem was supposed to have been solved.

The infrastructure problems, the deletions, the U.K. problems and the lack of communication are tempting me to turn away from a site that used to be a fairly fun little money maker. I am still undecided, though. If revenues go back up to what they were pre-U.K., continuing to write for them may end up being worth it.

What are your eHow payments like now? Have they gone back up, or are they tanking like mine are?