Earning slowdown on Helium

One of the disappointments of being an online writer is that occasionally earning are not as good as projected. At the moment, one of the sites that is disappointing me is Helium. Earnings are down for everyone, outside of those who do well in the marketplace and contests, about 90% based on comments on the community forum, which are matching my own earning drop.

(Ok, maybe, it is not everyone, but there is enourgh to be concerned about.)

Helium has been doing their best to soothe concerns about the drop. They point out that Helium is "revenue-sharing" which means that if advertising income is down, writers earnings also will be down when viewed as a whole.

One of the ways that they are trying to help out the writers is to award a bonus to those writers who maintain both a writing and a rating star. Unfortunately, this leaves three quarters of the writers still in the cold; a writing star is earned by having your articles on average rank in the upper quarter of their titles; considering that not everyone can be in the upper quarter, someone will be a loser with that bonus program.

So is this going to cause me to abandon Helium? Probably not. My view of Helium is a long view, and I am treating it as a long term investment. And the articles that are in my speciality, Wicca, pagan and Golden Dawn, are still pulling in money, though at a slower pace than I would like. Those articles, which I would write anyway, are still viable for me to write.

It is only those articles with a short and limited economic life that are no longer worth writing for Helium; fortunately, I have an outlet for them: Associated Content.

To illustrate how low earnings have dropped on Helium, the articles that I have on both Helium and AC are earning more from page views on AC than they are from revenue share on Helium.
So I will probably be focused on writing for Associated Content for general articles, with Helium only getting articles in my speciality until the ecomony improves. It is the only way that I can justify my opportuntiy costs at the moment.

Helium Writing Stars

Today, one of the article titles on the Helium home page was about "Earning Writing Stars on Helium." It is a hot topic. When I logged in, five writers had already wrote to it. At this point, eleven articles, including one by me, are in the stack.

The reason the title is so hot is that there are a lot of people interested in gaining a writing star, thanks to the current promotion going on over at Helium. Between the beginning of the year and April 14th, Helium will pay you a dollar for every article written provided that you have at least one writing star and three rating stars at midnight April 15th.

As I said before, I am not going to hold my breath that I am going to have a writing star come the magical hour. My plan for the first part of the year is to get another fifty decent articles written before the start of summer semester. And not just any articles, I want to write articles that earn me at least a dollar a year--anything less is not worth my time.

I am not about to change my plan because of the promotion. I have never had good luck with the promotions and contests there--basically I have the same luck as a writer as I do in other areas of my life. Short run, I can't win; long term, I can't lose. Therefore, it is best that I just continue doing what I was originally planning on doing and ignore the promotion.

Other writers on Helium, especially the newer ones, are flocking all over this promotion--quick money in their eyes. So they are writing a lot of articles quickly. I have a hard enough time hanging onto my writing star as it is--writing to a lot of titles that I don't care about will only create a lot of trash that would drag my star down (if I still have one--it flickers off and on). Besides I wonder if they have figured out the opportunity costs of what they are hacking out.

Let's say that they can hack out eight articles in the space of a day compared to my one lonely article (we are talking an eight hour day here). Looking at some of the stuff being written, and having studied the earnings of my first year's worth of articles, most of them do not look like money makers.

There is a chance that they will not make more than a penny over the course of a year on some of these articles. I know because some of my articles last year did not make more than a penny; I no longer write to these channels. So the bonus money may be all that they make from their work. So a potential of eight dollars if they are focused solely on the bonus program.

On the other hand, a writer like myself doing just one article a day that has the potential to make a dollar or more a year, and estimating a shelf life of ten years, can make ten dollars. Plus, I can recycle most of my stuff on other sites like Associated Content.

(Yes, I am ignoring inflation here. I am assuming that as inflation goes up, advertising costs will go up and so will my earnings.)

So who is smarter? I am not sure. But I am hoping that my plan makes more business sense than theirs does.

To get paid sooner or later

One of the things that both amuses me and confuses me is the number of people who reset their online earnings payouts to a higher amount than the lowest one possible. I first learned about people doing this on MyLot (a paid to post forum). The baseline payout amount is ten dollars there, but one can choose to set it to a higher amount. This behavior makes as much sense to me now as playing the lottery does.

If it was just to aviod paying fees to paypal, I would understand it. Paypal fees, for frequent recievers of payments, I understand are as bad as the fees that credit card machine service providers charge businesses. But many of the people resetting their default payout are not doing it to aviod fees; they are doing it because they are saving up the money for a bigger payment.

I understand the psychology behind it; it is the economical reality that I find faulty.

My viewpoint of this issue is colored, I must admit, by the fact that I ran a restraurant for someone else for a little over a decade. I learned a lot from the Renzios brothers.

Every dime that came in got deposited every night into an account at the closest bank to the location of the various restraurants that they own. And twice a month, this money would be taken out and transferred to their main bank account, so that they could write out payroll and expense checks.

The most important thing is the entire time it was in the bank, it was in an interest bearing account. So they were making money on money that they owed to other people. They are not alone in this practice; all businesses do this.

So by setting your payout to a higher amount, you are allowing those online companies that owe you money to keep the money in an account and earn interest on it. You are paying the opportunity cost of the interest you could have earned.

Why would anyone want to do this? Personally, I have my payout amounts set to the lowest amount that I can get them because I would rather have myself earning the interest rather than other people.

Now there is one occasion that I will wait to do a payout, and that is when I have to manually request payout, such as on Helium. Last month, I will admit that I gained the ability to cash out in the first week, but chose to wait until almost the end of the month to hit the request payment button. Why? Because it takes awhile for me to make payout there, so I waited until the last moment to request my payment. It allowed me to get another two dollars in my hands now that would have sat in their bank account for several months before I could request another payment.

The only reason I could do that is that one has to manually request payment, and they only sends out payments once a month. So I waited until the end of the payout cycle to request. Sure, it will only earn me a couple more cents of interest this year, but better that I earn it than them.

How much is exclusive (all rights) worth?

For those who missed it, there was a big flap today over on Associated Content. They made an announcement on the writer forum that they were no longer going to consider non-exclusive content for upfront payment. There was a lot of protesting, and by the time that you read this AC has changed their minds and decided to put this policy change off for awhile longer.

But it is coming; you can see the storm building over there. As time has gone on, AC has been rejecting more and more articles for upfront payment. You can still put them up for performance bonus (page view payment), but it has been getting harder to get them to cough up anything up front. Even when you are offering them exclusive rights (also known in the business as All Rights), it is getting harder to pry any upfront from them. And forget about getting a fair amount for anything (ten dollars is a really low all rights payment); even if you can crank out something in an hour, there is no way that their upfront offers will cover your time and energy.

Face it, economics has caught up to AC. They are hoping that decent writers will make enough from the performance bonus to stick around. And as it is they have a ton of writers flooding the stacks with stuff anyways. There are always new writers (unpublished and eager for that first byline) waiting to line up and write for them. It is only us established writers (those of us with more than one outlet for our work) who are going to bolt at the very idea that AC is trying to turn us into work for hire slaves.

Personally, I have already quit trying to get upfront payment for non-exclusive content from them. Outside of my first piece published there, I figure that anything I have used or plan on using elsewhere is off-limits when it comes to upfront payment. I use AC as a secondary income source for my work, not my primary one.

The only articles I consider giving them exclusive rights to are actually News (which are hard to sell on most websites unless you have a relationship already built) and those which felt into AC and that I can't think of any other place that I would ever use them. The problem with News, quite simply, is that it has a really short shelf life. The instant that it passes that point, and becomes no longer of interest, it will expire like month old fruit cake, forever on the web, but with earnings no longer coming from it. For instance, the last piece I offered to AC as an exclusive (Hillary Clinton speaks at Auraria Campus) was one that I figured could last until either the Democractic Convention this summer, or be dead in a couple of weeks. After all, it was political, things change there fast; and once a politician is out of the running, no one cares anymore.

On the other hand, I figure that an article about improving one's credit score will have some shelf life. And I can figure out more than one place to use it, so why offer it for upfront payment consideration; after all, I have to live with myself and I do have some ethics to my name. Besides for an non-exclusive, they are probably going to offer nothing; I can hit publish now and start generating page views from it.

AC and its content producers (writers) are both struggling with opportunity costs. AC realizes that they can focus on exclusive for upfront payment consideration and not lose much while the writers are realizing that the upfront payment on an exclusive is not worth the time that they spent writing the piece. It will be awhile, but we can expect to see more changes there as the supply and demand curves keep moving towards equilibrium.

Respect my work schedule

One of the problems with being a writer, especially a freelancer, is the general lack of respect for my work schedule that is exhibited by others.

Now some of my schedule problems this semester were of my own creation, and were the result of me planning based on best case scenario. For instance, when picking my classes this semester I scheduled an hour and forty-five minutes between two classes (Tuesdays and Thursdays). Originally, I planned on doing some writing between these two classes.

Three things has changed this plan.

The first of which was that the Auraria campus library in an effort to crack down in the homeless camping out in the library is requiring that you reserve a computer in advance. All public libraries (Auraria is a Federal library) in Denver are doing this. Given the fact that the class I am getting out of is Martin (Marty) Sabo's Microeconomics, it is occasionally difficult to figure out when I am leaving class. And considering that you are only allowed to use the computers for one hour--well, it is just easier to do other things during that time period.

(*The phone rings, and Morgan ends up walking outside to look at something*--an illustration of what he is talking about today as you will see.)

So I have chosen to do the occasional bit of homework, and errands during this little slot of time. The errands tie into the second thing that happened. Toni, my wife (common law), decided that she was going to go back to college. She is aiming for a Masters in Spanish to suppliment her skills as an art teacher. Due to this, she is swamped with homework, and many of the errands which were normally ran on the weekend are now being done during the week. This second part ties into the gist of today's blog--just wait.

And the third thing that happened is that one of my class mates from the philosophy class is also free during this hour and a half. Somehow, we have became friends, and generally agreed to set aside any thought of homework and other matters unless they are urgent. A lot of our discussions end up being about philosophy and reading, so it ties into school and my writing. I am willing to pay the opportunity cost of a Helium article a week to chat with someone.

At least, it was a mutual agreement to divert this time into friendly discussion. And so, we end up back at the second thing. Thanks to Toni being back in school, I have ended up running a lot of errands that should being done on the weekend. *sigh* I have lost track of the number of bank runs that I ended up doing for her.

The sad part is that it started before the semester did. And it illustrates completely my gripe of the day (too bad it happens so often that it is a common gripe among writers), the general lack of respect that people have for the work schedules of writers.

At the root of it, I think that people consider freelance writers to be unemployed. While I am beginning to make a steady tickle of nickels and dimes, it is not large enourgh to convince Toni that I am working. Occasionally, I whine that I could be making thirty thousand a year and she would still consider me unemployed. I firmly suspect that unless the job involve being on someone else's payroll and working in an office downtown that she will consider me unemployed.

It is a sore point for me. Especially when I have penciled in a day of writing, and it ends up being wasted on errands that I can run because I am "unemployed." Even when she is home, she just generally presumes that I am doing nothing. If she was home right now, despite the fact that I am typing at the computer, she would have no problem with interrupting me.

I am not allowed to do this when she is throwing pottery (a part time business she does), nor can I bug her when she is doing homework or paying bills; her concentration is sacred, mine is not.

And it is not just her.

Today is a prime illustration of this. Yesterday, one of Toni's friends called to ask if he could borrow the trailer that we have. I said that he could borrow it if he helped me unload the stuff that was being stored in the back of it (primarily ceiling board for the studio's ceiling). I wanted to do it this weekend, instead I end up doing it today. There was no asking me if it was good timing for me or not. Fortunately, I didn't have any hot projects, or overdue homework to hack out. But it distrubs me. Especially because he is also self-employed (locksmith, mechanic and general handyman).

What makes his profession rate higher in the scheme of things? What makes his schedule more important than mine?

I don't know. It irks me.

And other writers that I have talked to are also irked by things like this.

I have no solutions for the problem. I know that someday it will become a major issue for me.

In my case, I know that the emotional side of the problem comes from my childhood. My mother used to consider her schedule and needs more important than anything that I needed to do. A large part of my bad grades in High School can be contributed to the fact that babysitting my brothers and sisters were more important than me doing homework or showing up to my first class on time. I am programmed to put everyone else's need before my own.

But it is not right that I do so. Nor is it right that others expect me to do so either. Yet it happens all the time.

I beg all of you to respect the work schedules of writers. Especially mine. If you need me to change my schedule--ask, don't impose.

Oh why?

Someone yesterday asked me why I thought that I felt that I was not going to make my goal of 50,000 words for the month. Quite honestly, I am just too far behind to catch up. And the world is just not cooperating with me either at the moment.

With what is starting to pile up on my desk, most of it lodge (Golden Dawn) related, it is easier to acknowledge that I am going to fail in this task than continue to pull my hair out.

Note that I am stubborn enough to continue working on it--I think that I can rescue part of it and make it into a publishable story. It is just realistically I have to choose which is more important--hacking out 50,000 words which I may or may not be able to use, or work on some Golden Dawn lectures that I know that I can recycle.

Considering Golden Dawn is my writing speciality, it wins.

Sooner or later, if you are a sucessful writer, you have to make choices like this. As a writer, and a businessman (I would use business person here, but it sounds tinny to my ear), you have to be aware of opportunity costs.

Opportunity cost for those who have not taken economics is defined as the best alternative to what you actually did. Before this opportunity to expand the lodge's lectures arose, the best alternative to writing the 50,000 words was to spend time writing for Helium, AC and CC--provided of course that writer's block or depression didn't raise its ugly head. And a few short submissions for the print market.

Now the opportunity cost if I continue to focus mainly on the 50,000 words will be a lost opportunity to expand the lodge's lessons (which I can harvest bits from to make a few dollars) and a good chance that my local Golden Dawn lodge can overcome its membership shortage. Considering that Bast Temple is my test field for my Golden Dawn writings, its membership is important to me. As is the SOM.

We are looking at the difference between a sure thing and a really long shot. At this point, I chose the sure thing. Mainly because it is a proved field for me.

Golden Dawn is one of the subjects that I can potboil. It is something that I am an expert on, that I can write rapidly, and that I have already established the setup for future PR campaigns. For me, despite the fact that a successful novel would result in more money, it is the better bet.

That is my logic. Besides it will be more exciting to attempt a whole novel in November; after all, November is term paper season.