WritingUp.com: Great Community, but is it a Site Where Bloggers Can Earn?

John Jonas, the creator of the blogging site WritingUp, really had a decent vision. As his "mission statement" on the site's home page tells it, he was inspired by the constant requests for information he received from people who were looking for ways to make money working from home. He and a programmer buddy from college, named Dan, put their heads together and came up with the idea of hosting an open site for bloggers and monetizing it through the Google Adsense program.

The pitch they initially made for the site was juicy indeed, and a lot of people joined the site and signed up for adsense accounts with high hopes. Why wouldn't they, when it was intimated that if they wrote for 15-20 minutes each day they could be earning several hundred dollars a month within a year's time. That was the magic mantra: give it one year. Many of us set out to do just that; but months of seeing nickles and dimes accumulate in one's adsense account can dampen enthusiasm after a while.

When people became disgruntled, John Jonas pinpointed the problem as the way that Google was indexing the various blogs on the site. They didn't know what the site was "about" because it wasn't "about" anything; it was a collection of a lot of disparate writings about nearly every topic imaginable. Jonas set out to address the problem my removing WritingUp from Google's index for a time and revamping the site so that various blogs would fall under certain definite - and, hopefully, much more searchable - categories.

This seemed to improve the amount of readership that bloggers were receiving. Still, earning money was a tenuous affair because it could only be accomplished when browsers clicked on the ads that Google posted alongside the blogs. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block was the ads themselves; the majority of them seemed to have little to do with the content they were posted alongside. Google Adsense is intended to monetize sites by providing advertisements (paid by a host of advertisers) on pages of relevant content. This means that if you write a post about pinatas, you'll be hoping to see some Google pinata ads attached to it. On WritingUp, it was often a case of writing about hershey bars and then getting a bunch of paid survey advertisements attached to that particular blog.

In the meantime, while many of us were becoming disillusioned with this money making scheme that, in hindsight, had seemed a little too good to be true from the start, we were discovering that blogging on WritingUp was actually a lot of fun. The site has always been home to a lot of diverse, intelligent, and colorful individuals. In a way, this aspect of the site became even more prominent when it proved to be not so profitable. When the spammers discovered that they weren't going to make a quick buck on WritingUp, they went elsewhere. Those who enjoyed the self-expression and the discourse stayed. Writing groups, book discussions, and even a politically-oriented group of Hunter S. Thompson devotees, the Gonzo Warriors, formed. There were plans underway to get this whole crazy bunch together for a barbecue somewhere - plans which, sadly, never came to fruition.