Beware

Helium has always been an online place for writers to post their articles and make a little residual income from their writing. Some writers even made a nice income, especially if they used the Marketplace section of Helium. All that has changed. The Helium Blues has come and it doesn’t look like they are going to be leaving.

Beginning this month, November 2008, Helium changed the way they pay writers who post articles on their site. In the past, writers got a share of the ad revenue brought in from Helium using Google Adsense on article pages. As of November 1st, writers now have to take time out of their busy schedules to rate the articles on the site, articles from other people, in order to get a “rating star”. The nonsense of all of this “rating” business is that writers cannot make even one penny for their articles already on the site, residual income as in the past, unless they rate other articles and gain this “rating star”.

Writers could also make money from the Marketplace section, and still can. Writers now can be paid upfront for new articles they post to Helium, which is a nice thought. It’s a very low amount, however. Helium says on their site, “Depending on your writing stars, you will receive from 50 cents to $2.50 for each article published that month”. Even getting paid upfront now depends on you taking the time to rate the articles of others on Helium’s site. And get this… Helium is being SO generous that they will now offer a whopping $3 rating bonus to each Helium member with five rating stars. That will buy me a gallon of milk for my time, if the milk is on sale… maybe.

Helium says that now all we, as professional writers, need to do is maintain at least one of their new rating stars. Sounds easy enough. And to be fair, it doesn’t take a lot of time to log onto Helium and click a button over and over just to say we rated articles so that we can now be paid for the articles that we have already had on Helium. But why should we have to do that to get paid for our own work? We shouldn’t have to!

In the past, Helium was a nice site to get residual income for our articles. And of course Helium made their money too, using Google Adsense and paying writers a percentage of the ad revenues from Google Adsense. I personally had no problem with the old way, even though it wasn’t a large income…. but it was something, and we were paid for our writing. We didn’t have to write AND rate to make money. Why should we have to rate now just to get paid for what we have already done? It’s nonsense.

Frankly, what Helium is doing now is making money off of our work, and unless we give into their “rating game” and rate articles just to get paid, we will no longer make even one penny off of any of our articles on their site. Helium, however, will continue to make money off of our work, off of our articles, off of our time. They won’t give us a penny for our own work any longer. Unless, of course, we take the time to play their “rating game”.

There were several emails sent back and forth between me and Helium in the past few hours concerning this new policy. In short, they now expect us to give away our work for free if we don’t want to sit and rate articles just to make the ad revenue share for our present online work on their site. They maintain that legal issues prevent them from removing our work from their site. Legal issues? Hardly! The fact is they are still making money from us, from our work, and they don’t think they have to pay us for that work any longer.

In all fairness, in one email I was told that when I signed up for Helium, I agreed to their terms and conditions. We all did that. Not a problem, and indeed I did agree to them. I signed up with Helium two years ago. The terms and conditions at the time I signed up and up until November 2008 were those terms and conditions. The new way I did not agree to nor did I sign up for said terms. I signed up to terms and conditions that said I would be paid ad revenue shares. Helium has broken their agreement with me. They now refuse to pay ad revenue without a “rating star”, and they also refuse to remove my articles from their site. … articles that they are making money from…. articles that I no longer am making even one penny from.

I have come to the conclusion that Helium is apparently much more in need of those pennies than I am.

Share your thoughts and experiences, please.

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