Serious Freelance Writers: Helium — Under the Hood of a Self-Publishing Site
The internet has decisively changed the way freelance writers write and make a living. Why? Because anyone with a blog likes to call themselves a freelance writer. Citizen journalists, pro bloggers, you name it and everyone in the English and non-English speaking world is selling their word wares and competitively — like for money.
Helium is a self-publishing website that I’m trying out, test driving if you will, along with Associated Content. Registration is free and you can publish just about any topic of article you like, but you "earn" points and dollars (apparently) when you write to a competitive topic. Helium users rate peer articles (anonymously) and based on the opinion of other site users your article is rated alongside the others for that same topic. Now when I first registered I really did not understand how the Helium system works. Associated Content makes sense in a totally market-driven Pay-per-Click world–every time your article is viewed you earn (a ridiculous 10th of 1 cent, but that paradigm I can follow). But the Helium model is a bit ambiguous. I have however earned a few bucks over $100 in the last couple weeks for a handful of articles, compared to 29 cents on AC.
Helium Marketplace: Helium provides a Marketplace where publisher/partners can invite Helium content writers to submit to a topic or multiple topics. Publishers provide fairly clear requirements for each piece as well as post a final writer’s "take" or price they agree to pay out to the chosen writer(s.) Again, articles are rated by peers, but if publishers are good they will pay little attention to the rating. Here’s why:
If you are a good writer, I know everyone considers themselves a good writer just like all the people who try-out for American Idol really think they are good vocalists. But if you really are a good writer you must understand that a site like Helium and AC exclude no one. I have been delivered dozens of random articles to rate side-by-side on Helium. You’re given radio buttons that allow you to size up one against the other: "slightly better," "by far," "more," etc. But there have been more than a few article submissions I’ve been given to "rate" and I have seriously wondered where in the hell the "total shit" button is located. You will be rated alongside writers whose literary prowess is non-existent, who cannot even logically break a page of prose into paragraphs (a couple that have no notion of punctuation, including periods) and clearly have no idea how to use spellcheck when a big bright button is provided to do just that, and then another group whose first language is CLEARLY not English. But this is the nature of the beast and you live with it or you move on. I remember being the last one chosen on the playground for softball — I sucked and that feeling sucks, so I have to get over my "what’s he doing writing" attitude. **Bottom line for me: Helium rating means squat.
The Helium rating flaw: Users earn points for rating as well as writing. The more you write and rate the more stars you win which somewhere along the way translates into monetary earnings. That’s quite an incentive for someone who may not even know how to jot a coherent grocery list. Now in a model where the more you rate the more you potentially earn don’t you think a whole bunch of bottom feeders are rating without reading? Click, click, click, rate, rate, rate with nary a read. And for articles written to a competitive Marketplace, topic raters are not provided the article constraints as laid out by the publisher buying the work. So the value of the information is rated on a totally subjective basis with no knowledge of the assignment that’s been given. A writer could produce a fine article, but if it strays off the publisher criteria who knows that? That would be pertinent information for the "citizen editors" to know when rating for content. But as it stands now, the reader/raters don’t have a clue what a writer may be required to include in his/her article. Really this is essentially an editorial issue and normal everyday citizens are not equipped to edit–it’s all user opinion. Perfectly crappy writing has managed to float to the top of some of the competitive topic streams–why? your guess is as good as mine and that’s precisely my point. Do I have a beef? You bet I do. But getting frustrated is really just counter-productive and I don’t have time to buzz like a mad housefly. Really the intent behind Helium rating is to inspire users to improve–you can revise your articles so they are re-rated. But again the Helium rating matrix is so unclear that this is not a valuable indicator of improvement or quality.
- How many users view an article to rate it? Is it one (possible idiot just clicking through a rating race) or is the final rating based on an average number of ratings for a given article?
- In a pool of 50 articles how many times is my submission read and to which articles in the spectrum is it compared?
Serious online freelancers willing to give Helium a go: My advice is write for the Marketplace, for publishers that are looking for good content. And don’t read the competition, just write your own thing, because otherwise you’ll lose your mind. That’s right: just do your own thang. Hope, like me, that publishers are wise enough to read ALL the submissions. In the end you may just decide to move on to bigger pastures. I’m heading that way….
Interested in trying out Helium?
February 25, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Thanks for the strong post. I didn’t know about helium before.
March 10, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Have you changed your mind at all about Helium in the time since you’ve written this post? I’ve written a couple of articles for Helium and while they are doing well in the ratings, I’ve got a couple of beefs with the site:
The site itself is not visually accessible for me (the layout uses the arbitrary line-height the makes lines overwrite themselves when the text is enlarged). Also I have a tough time with the limited formatting a writer can use to layout an article. Even bold face text is nonexistant, so basically the only thing you can do for readability is use all caps for subtitles and plenty of white space between paragraphs.
I thought like you that the writing for the Helium Marketplace is the only worthwhile option, because it brings a chance of real money from an actual publisher. But when one of my articles was chose by a Helium publisher, for the $16 they offered, they wanted me to sign away all rights to the article. They would not agree to allow me to retain rights to using revised content (I was thinking perhaps in the future I could sell the same article – revised- to a “real” publisher).
Not only that, but the fact that I’d been simultaneously posting my articles on my weblog counted as “publishing” and ruled out any of my articles being purchased by any Helium marketplace publisher. Or that’s what I gathered, through correspondence with a Helium staffer. So beware, it’s not as easy as it seems….