How to Make Money at Helium: Understanding the Writing and Rating Star Systems

Helium's income system is complicated, and made more complicated still by the fact that they have been reforming it, so that you may still be assuming you're operating under the old system when in fact you're not. This article is a guide to the opportunities to earn income on Helium as of early 2010, for easy reference. Most of the information found here is also presented in the Helium help files, though it's spread over several pages and can be a little difficult to follow.

(Incidentally, the notion that it is in any way appropriate to demand that freelancers effectively submit all of their work on spec and then have it pass through a sort of electronic popularity contest to determine whether they'll be paid really rankles the professional freelancers, which you'll probably figure out if you read any of their blogs, like Every Joe and the Social Writer, Tim Beyers. And they're probably right, but some of us do it anyways.)

Essentially, there are two revenue streams on Helium: active, and passive. The active stream involves payments for articles as you write them; the passive, ongoing payments transferred to you based on the number of visitors your articles receive and (I assume) who click on your ads. For both sources of income, Helium has set certain relatively strict eligibility requirements, which you must continue to meet at all times to be eligible for any payments.

First, the active methods. For this system, Helium has established the "writing star" qualification. Up to five writing stars are awarded, based on a combination of the number of articles you have written and the average rating they have received from the Helium community, which reviews all submitted articles collectively. To receive a writing star, you must rank in the top 25%, on average, over all the articles you have submitted to titles in which two or more other Helium authors have also submitted copy. If you fall below the 75th percentile, you lose your stars and you lose your money.

The more articles you write, the more stars you get, and Helium also gives you a slight decrease in the threshold requirement. A person who has submitted 100 articles, for example, only needs to beat the 73rd percentile in order to qualify for income. A person who has submitted over 500 articles only needs to be in the top one-third of all submissions. Articles you've submitted to a title that only has at most one other submitter qualify for your total count of articles written, but don't factor into the percentile calculation. You can see right away that this has the potential to actually be a losing game for most submitters: by definition, for pretty much every title, up to three in four submitters are going to be at risk of harming their score and perhaps even losing their writing star.

For those with a calculator, the actual algorithm is slightly more complex. Helium eliminates the worst 10% of articles you have written. Then, for the remainder, it calculates your score with the following formula: number of articles above yours, divided by the total number of articles, multiplied by 100. For example, if you are 2nd out of 4, then that still puts you in the top (1*100/4) = 25% range. As you can see, for categories with less than seven submitters, the Helium algorithm does give you a higher score than a strictly mathematical calculation would normally allow you. Nevertheless, the odds aren't good, and they get worse as more people submit articles.

Once you can make money by selling content to external publishers -- in other words, selling the rights to your material to purchasers other than Helium. This normally occurs through the Marketplace, where purchasers post writing topics and choose the best from submissions produced on spec by Helium members. However, external groups can also purchase the rights to any article on Helium, and when they do, Helium transfers most of the income to you as a commission. Mind you, if the Marketplace contractors decide they don't like any of the submissions, they're not obligated to buy any of them. So potentially this is a losing situation for everyone concerned.

Either way, this is a turkey shoot. By definition, all but one of the people who go through the full effort of preparing an article for the Marketplace are going to get nothing to show for their efforts. And the likelihood that someone is going to buy one of your articles off of the regular Helium site isn't good, although it's not, I suppose, entirely unheard of.

The most obvious opportunity for active income comes from up-front payments. These seem to be lower than sites like Associated Content normally offer to Americans (though higher than Associated Content offers to Canadians, since we don't currently qualify for up-front payments). Helium pays between $0.50 and $2.00 for every article that you submit and that ranks in the top five articles for a title -- your pay amount is determined by how many writing stars you've earned. On top of that, you can earn an additional dollar if you're the first person to submit an article to an empty title.

Again, there's a risk here. Payments are calculated on a monthly basis, and if by the end of the month you've slipped out of the top five spots in that article, you won't be paid (and even worse, you could jeopardize your writing star, and lose all your potential payments). But this is a much more manageable risk, compared to the Marketplace. Helium does let you edit, or "leapfrog," an article, though you can only do so once per week.

The second method of payment is through passive income. Helium shares out its ad revenue on the basis of which articles got visits and clicks, and how many rating stars you have. Rating stars are the eligibility system for passive income, and work effectively the same as writing stars: you must rate a certain number of articles submitted by other writers. (Rating is a relatively simple system in which you vote for which article of a given pair is better, and by what degree.) In this case, your rating has to go along with the crowd (whose ratings you're not aware of) 75% of the time in order to get your rating star.

I'm not yet sure how this income is calculated, but some of it seems to be paid daily rather than monthly, because since setting up my Helium account a few days ago I've been given a few cents in passive income for my tiny collection of articles.

Oh, and you have to get all the way to $25 before Helium will pay you. Go figure.