First of all, I noticed how that big announcement said "key content." What if they don't think my content is good enough to publish there? What if it doesn't fit with HubPages' style? And finally, I discovered via one of the comments after the Squidoo post that HP has a $50 minimum payout, which is twice as bad as Squidoo's. But hey - I can move it to HubPages! And they'll even handle the transfer.Įxcept I don't want to transfer.
Basically, it says that as of August 29th - 13 days from today - my content will be gone from Squidoo. There was a link there to a post by Squidoo HQ about this. Big News! HubPages is acquiring key content from Squidoo I logged in and there at the top of my dashboard page was a big announcement: In the comment section someone mentioned Squidoo. A new post came through on the feed about problems at that site (more on this later) so I went there to read it. I have an RSS feed set up for the blog of Zujava, another site I write for. Here is how I found this momentous piece of information: (And after I spent all that time writing that long post.)Īnd how did I find this out? Did Squidoo email everyone many weeks in advance, as Yahoo did? Did they even email anyone at all? No, and no. But maybe I should do another post about that. But it's still not enough to get me back on my own and back out West I am still suffering though this horrible Eastern climate. So Turk was definitely a step in the right direction. Since I started there my income has consistently been much, much higher than it ever was with article writing - I think my best month with Yahoo and Squidoo was maybe $30 and my worst month with MTurk has been about $120. Mechanical Turk was definitely a good choice as a substitute for writing. Plus, it also takes money - hosting fees and the like - and my income is too low for much of that now. I'm just not sure I want to spend the time it takes to build something like that. This has been mentioned several times in the past I remember reading it when I used to spend more time there, before I discovered Mechanical Turk. The general consensus on the writers' forum is that the best - or maybe only - way to make money with writing is with your own site. They were a good idea whose time has come - and gone. And even if I wanted to do that, I really think "article farms" are on the way out. There are a few still around that I could write for - HubPages, for example - but I'm not sure how successful that would be even the people on the writers' forum who went to HP when Squidoo closed seem to be unhappy with it now. So Zujava wasn't being well managed for probably quite a while before the Amazon issue.Īnyway - that's the last of the sites with my written content. It also occurs to me that this was not the first time I've asked something and not been answered it's happened before (although I can't remember the circumstances now). There was no reply - not even a message saying "Sorry, you won't be getting any money." The site closed three days ago, PayPal has not notified me of any payments, and at this point I'm not expecting one. Zujava's minimum payout was $5 so I hadn't reached the point of collecting on it but, thinking that maybe when the site closed all those debts would be cleared, I sent a message asking about it. I already had copies of my content so it wasn't a big deal for me, but I did see in checking my account that I'd made a bit over $3. When the owners decide to close a site it's their responsibility to tell the members - not the members' responsibility to tell each other. Well, duh - if you'd done that yourself you wouldn't have to worry about it. After I read it on that writers' forum I went to the Zujava forum and found a discussion there, including a request from the owner for everyone to please tell others so they could remove their content before the site went down. But it would have been nice if they'd sent everyone an email about it. They'd lost their major income source, Amazon's affiliate program, and having worked at (but not for) Amazon for more than a year now I knew they wouldn't get it back the big A doesn't work that way.
Zujava's closing was not really a surprise. I found out by accident when I visited a writers' forum that I used to hang out on but only check in with every now and then, because I'm not currently doing any writing.
Zujava sent no emails it was announced on their blog but those of us who don't check that regularly missed it. Squidoo didn't do anything until it got talked about in the comments to their blog announcement and then finally sent an email, with 2 weeks to go.
Yahoo gave its writers several weeks' notice before it shut down.
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