Why Helium's Website Doesn't Work for Writers

I've been writing for the internet for a long time and I have experience with many pay per click writing websites. Helium was the first of these that I discovered. Naturally, I was excited about the prospect of making money. However, it wasn't long before I realized that their entire writing system ends up working against the writers that contribute to their site.

For one thing, all the content on Helium is unoriginal because that's the way the site is designed. Writers can contribute to any existing topic so that simple how tos or editorials end up with as many as 60 or 70 articles that are the same. You end up competing for views and only the top articles in each topic tend to get many views. And even with a top rated article, your views are still shared with dozens of others who wrote practically the same article.

Over time, an article that was once top rated stops being relevant and new articles, not because they are of greater quality, but because they are more current, float to the top. Things like that happen, especially with pop culture or news stories. The problem with Helium is that your Writing Stars are based on how highly rated your articles are. The biggest downside to that is that unless you have one Writing Star, you cannot write for the Marketplace, which is the only place on Helium where a writer can make substantial profit.

But even that has its drawbacks for writers. When an assignment is posted to the Marketplace, you do not automatically get paid upon completion. The publishers get to pick among all the submissions and only the chosen article gets paid. Often, these assignments don't even get published to Helium to earn you money based on page views.

The worst part of Helium is the rating system. A well written article takes time and in order to make a substantial income, a writer must write a lot. On Helium, you don't get paid unless you also have Rating stars, which means you have to rate a certain number of articles per month. This process involves comparing two articles on the same topic and judging which, if any, is better than the other. It's a waste of time and I'm sure most people don't even read the articles; they just click in order to maintain their Rating Stars and their ability to earn.

If you want to make a change to an existing article, especially when it's getting low in the rankings, you have to "Leapfrog" it, which means, people get to rate your edited article against its already published version and the one they choose is the one that remains on the site. It's pretty frustrating for a writer to have other people decide what version of your work is displayed.

All the complicated rules on the site end up restricting creativity and wasting a lot of your time with little profit.