Made the top 500 on Yahoo Voices in April 2013

Yes, I took a screen shot of this because I was excited.  

And this is how I imagine that other people will feel about it.

So, I made the Top 500 in April 2013 on the Yahoo Contributor Network--for having a really big audience on Yahoo Voices (formerly Associated Content). What does this really mean? Probably nothing at all. Or that the audiences are really small. Or perhaps that my small payment for pageviews were in the top 500--in which case, it is just proof that even the best writers are starving artists--or not, depending on the clout level (levels nine and ten get paid more than clout level eight). Still I thought that I would say something because I do not remember the last time that I advertised my work on Yahoo Voices.

Lots of work for very little money

Today, I was on myLot for a few minutes...goofing off mainly. As most of you know, myLot is a site where you are paid to participate (aka discuss things). The earnings are really low; but as a writer, I do find it handy for coming up with things to write about.

Anyway, I was looking at the discussions posted in the "making money" section when I came across this wonderful idea being trotted out for making very little money when wasting a whole lot of time. Try not to laugh too hard as I mock the posting (spelling and grammar corrected).

"Wonderful earning opportunity for those who have both Facebook and Paypal accounts. Announcing a new site paying members to 'Like' the content of its members. Get paid $.01 per like. Sign up today and recieve 5-12 new articles to like per day."

Minimum payout is ten dollars.  And the site is charging people a dollar for fifty likes.

And for me, this site is just typical of online earning opportunities designed for those people who are incapable of doing basic math. Let's do some math, shall we?

With a payout threshold of ten dollars, and assuming the minimum number of expected new "like" requests per day, it would take someone two hundred days to reach the threshold. Furthermore, if it takes you two minutes a day to do the work, then you would earn ten dollars for six or seven hours of work dribbled out over the course of a year.

Sounds like a lot of bloody work for very little money. I think that I will stick to my writing instead.

But it is typical of most of the online income opportunities that you see. And the only people to really make money from them are the people who set them up. Look at this one---half of the money is earmarked for payment to the "likers." Yet, we all know that most of the people who sign up to do this work are not going to make payout; they will give up long before they reach threshold. This is a win for the organizers of the scam (I call them as I see them).

The customer who is paying for "likes" is also losing. In the short term, they are getting Facebook likes. But in the long term, these likes are going to be worthless, or less than worthless. People and search engines get wise to this type of tactic. And search engines punish companies and individuals who use them.

So the only winners, the only people who really benefit from the system, are the scam organizers (again, I am calling it like I see it).

I find that basic math like this reveals that most online income opportunities pay less than flipping burgers. Writing, photography and art---all pay better if you have some talent. Heck, they pay better even if you don't have talent (the announcement for this new income opportunity was just horrible).

As for the name of the opportunity, it is Rylcolike (that is how they spelled it---I have yet to be able to actually locate them on the internet---just curiosity really, I would never actually sign up for this type of work---after all, I can do basic math).

Do you expect instant success?

Something that I noticed among those people who are involved with the various writing sites (Helium, Associated Content, etc.) is that a lot of people join them, write a couple of articles, then become upset when the money does not come flooding in. Then they post a complaint and leave in a huff.

Now, there are people who do not fall under this category. People who are willing to put in the time and energy to build up a stock of articles. These people eventually reach payout.

And as far as I can tell, these two types of people populate all the earning possibilities. Whether it is PTC, PTR, survey sites, social networking, etc. Either they expect instant success, or they are in it for the long haul. The same holds true for brick and mortar ventures.

In my case, I tend to assume for the writing sites that I will only earn a stack of pennies after I create a ton of articles. I am in it for the long haul.

I think that one of the reasons for this expectation is my experience with previous businesses. My father never made any quick money. And restaurants make mere pennies for their most frequently sold items. It is time and volume that makes up the profit, not a quick instant success. Or at least, that is the way it works in my universe.

Mylot glitch and rumor fixed

Last week, over the weekend, Mylot had a small computer glitch. Basically, earnings were not being updated in a timely manner. Of course, this started people (or maybe more properly trolls) talking about how Mylot was not going to pay anymore. Computer glitch, trolls and rumors---what an unpleasant combination.

I wasn't worried. As many of my readers know, I use Mylot to relax, and perhaps warm up for a day's worth of writing. For me, Mylot is only a little pile of pennies, not neccessary a big deal if it did go payless. I just don't have enourgh referrals to make it worth my time to sweat over.

But it does call to mind two things.

First off, you should never be relying on one source of income that its removal causes you to panic. This is especially true for us writers. Markets come and go, and you should never have all your eggs in just one basket.

The second thing is that I have heard rumors like this on every site I belong to when a glitch results in earnings not being updated in a timely fashion. Trolls like to use every little glitch to stir up the pot. While some sites do go under, there are far more rumors than actual sites going under. One should never rely on rumors to figure out the health of a website that you are earning on.

Joined Bukisa

Now that I am done with the Open Full Moon ritual, I finally had time to do a couple of things that I have been putting off.

I checked my grades: two As (Shakespeare; History: Theory and Practice), one A- (Literature: Cather Willa) and one B+ (Rome: City and Empire). I am going to have to go online later and see if I can figure out what is up with my aid for the fall semester.

On the writing end, I am working on three book reviews.

And I finally got around to joining Bukisa. An online writer friend told me about the site a couple of months ago, but I just did not have time to go look at it until today.

Bukisa is another site that you can post articles to and earn income from. It reminds me of Associated Content except that you can earn referral income from Bukisa, a whole three levels worth. There are no upfront payments, but the rate for thousand unique pageviews is higher than Associated Content. The payout threshold is ten dollars, payable though Paypal (net plus 30). The site is open to non-US residents.

Bukisa may be worth the time for an online writer to check out. One knows that those who are good at getting referrals are going to flock to it, simply because they will do better there than on Helium and Associated Content.

Click my articles, I will click on yours

Today on myLot, I was reading a discussion where the poster was asking for people to form a partnership with him on one of the writing sites (one where you get paid by the page view).

His idea (or was it a she---I couldn't tell from the avatar or the user name---doesn't matter) was that if you become his friend on the site, and click on all of his articles, then he will click on all of yours. "That way both of our earnings could go up!"

Hmmm...I am a happy little cynic: if you click on his articles, how do you know that they are going to return the favor? Furthermore, isn't this a violation of most of the user agreements that the writing sites use?

And here is the real tragedy for you. If you actually want to make more money, you are actually better off writing more articles and advertising them rather than doing a scheme like this.

Don't believe me: try such a scheme with a willing writing friend and track the amount of clicks you do, the amount of time that you waste, and how little the two of you earn. Then get back to the typewriter (my age is showing) and continue writing. Forget such schemes; they do not work.

Surfing with the trends

One of the causes for spikes in my online earnings as a writer is when I just happen to have a piece that is related to a hot news story and people start suddenly reading my content; in other words, I managed to get lucky to be a part of the websurfing trend.

Such earnings tend to be short-lived, but they are interesting to experience.

There are three ways to get involved in such trends.

One is to be a really fast writer, and keep up with the news. I tend not to be in that category, though I did write a personal comment on Flight 1404 when it ran into trouble a couple of weeks ago. I am a college student after all; most of my writing is done between classes without any internet or media access.

The second way is to predict what is coming up in the news. I am more in this category than the previous one. Like for instance, I suspected that today's unemployment news was going to be bad. Therefore, I wrote a piece about how unemployment is defined.

(If you ask me, I believe the official reports are unstating the problem. After all, I am a discouraged worker [unemployed but no longer looking for a job]; how many more are actually out there?)

But let's be honest, all of us could have made that prediction.

The third way, which is my personal long term plan, is just to have a variety of articles online. I am in the process of creating articles in categories I have no articles in yet; another reason for the set of unemployment articles that I am writing.

The reason that I lean towards the last option, besides time restrictions, is that most surfers are using a search engine to find items of interest to them. So if an article has not been indexed yet by a search engine (Google seems to be the main way for people to find my stuff), then no one is going to find it. Most of the traffic on the article sites, such as Helium and Associated Content are coming from search engines and not internal traffic.

I just hope that my unemployment article has been indexed already, so that I get some surfing income from that one.

Second time this month

So today is the second time this month that my rating percentage had dropped suddenly on Helium and I have lost my rating star.

To be more accurate, I did some rating and regained my star, then had it climb to two stars before it dropped to one and then none.

And this just makes me more likely to focus on Associated Content, abandoning Helium to its own graces.

It did not take a cracked crystal ball to be able to predict that a pattern like this was going to happen on Helium. Tying the earnings into the rating star system means that to get paid, you have to have a rating star. And the month-end bonus, which is not a lot to me (just three dollars) is a lot to some, ensures a frenzy of ratings at the end of every month as those people who are close to the edge rate rapidly to trying to get it.

What this means to a regular writer is that if you have work up on Helium is that you have to check in everyday to check your rating star and periodically have to rate (instead of writing) to maintain your earnings there. All this has done (ignoring the fact that those who are earning are earning more pennies than before) is to make the other writing sites, such as Associated Content look better than before.

I guess my biggest problem is that rates that were worth a rating star earlier this week, then two stars, are worth nothing today. It is like playing the stock market in terms of frustration.

Before you ask: no, I did not drop in the number of rates that I have done. Quite literally, rates that I did that were good quality earlier this month are now considered bad quality rates.

Helium has always played it close to the vest when it comes to defining what is a quality rate. But I think that it is safe to say that a quality rate must somehow tie into what the average rate looks like. Either the average quality has gone up or the system is awash in poor ratings.

Those who know my opinionated personality will be able to guess what I think.

So given the fact that I keep losing rating stars, I have to decide whether I should stick around on Helium or focus my time and energy elsewhere.

I figure that I have to spend ten mintues a day rating articles to be safe. And that is everyday.

(For those of you who are curious, my wife [the elementary art school teacher] is on vacation this week and next week; she is also tying up the only computer with internet access to do reasearch on her family tree; my computer time is limited until school starts again. But then again, I am a college student, Helium should not even be able to make me think about the following.)

So we are looking at fifteen hours of rating over a ninety day period. This is fifteen hours of writing that I do not get to do.

For someone with a thousand articles on Helium, this might not be a bad deal. Or maybe it is a bad deal. Lets assume that the average article on Helium is worth fifty cents a year. Lets assume everyone needs to do the same amount of rating (ten minutes a day); converting this to an hourly wage: 2.78 an hour.

(In my case, I figure with the number of articles I have and my income that rating pays about a dollar an hour. It is just too bad that writing an article actually takes time and my potential income from writing is actually higher than that, even if I am just writing for the college newspaper.)

And this is why I and many other writers on Helium were against the idea of tying the daily revenue share (the pennies) into the maintaining a rating star in the first place. It redefined the term "active member" to mean something much different than what it originally was.

Today, the active member has to be working on the site at least ten minutes a day. Just to earn a few pennies.

I understand why Helium did it; but as a small time writer without a lot of articles on Helium, it is probably not in my best interest to remain active on Helium.

To say that I am frustrated would be an understatement.

Just lost my Helium Rating Star

Today, I was reminded why I was against the very idea of Helium tying the daily earnings into the rating star system.

Yes, today I lost my rating star.

Since November, my rating percentage has been dropping. And overnight I lost two percentage points which wiped out my rating star. And yes, I am going to be told that I should have stayed home last night and rated a bunch of articles, rather than going out and doing my job as a lodge officer.

Yes, I am upset.

The drawback of tying the earnings to the rating stars has never been pointed out by the Helium staff. I know enourgh math to guess at the horrible truth; over half the writers will not get paid on any given day.

At the moment, I am at 72% on rating and with 134 ratings done; in order to regain my star, I figure that I have to do over a hundred ratings. And lets presume that my rating percentage is going to continue to drop. At a certain point in time, it is better that I abandon Helium than continue to fight the battle.

Essentially, I have a choice now. I can either focus on my writing or my rating. I started off in Novermber with a 82%; in the space of a month and a half, I lost ten percentage points.

Either other people got really good at rating, or my fears are true and the system does consider the majority to be the norm and bases what it considers to be a quality rate on the masses.

For those who don't know, I am the same person that loathed peer review days in my college writing classes. My sentences were considered too long; no one was present from my regular audience; and my classe mates were writing stuff that could have been ripped from any television sit-com.

Bottom line, Helium may have just lost me as a writer.

This college break I am booked nine ways to Sunday for time, between the lodge (mainly rewriting the entire website) and house repairs. I am supposed to be focusing on my writing, not spending all my time rating which do not increase my potential earnings.

I think that Associated Content just became my primary focus when it comes to online writing. And Constant Content all of a sudden looks a lot better.

I understand why Helium has to force their members to rate, but I think it is going to cost them a lot of good writers in the end, especially if the system is going by the majority to determine how good a person's rating skill is.

Helium rating frenzy

One does not need a cracked crystal ball to be able to predict certain things. Last month when Helium announced that they were not only tying in one's ability to earn the daily revenue share (the pennies) to the rating star, but that they were going to give a three dollar bonus to anyone who had five rating stars at the end of the month, I could see somgthing coming.

And that was there would be a frenzy of rating occuring on Helium at the end of this month. This is the first month that the bonus kicks in, so there are a lot of writers over there rating their hearts out in an attempt to get the bonus.

I know this is happening just based on a couple of things: my own rating percentage has been dropping (bare minimum ratings on my part; I decided homework was more important) and several writers that I watch have been increasing their rating stars.

Now earlier this month, in fact this time last week, I decided that it was not worth the effort to try for the bonus this month. Instead I devoted my time to writing a set of lectures on the Grades of Golden Dawn instead. It is for the GD lodge that I belong to, Bast Temple; plus I could recycle the set on Associated Content. I thought about recycling it also on Helium, but it is too long to do so. I will have to do an abbrievated version, a summary, for Helium.

The set of lectures had to be done. And there was only so much time to do things on this Thanksgiving break. And getting my fifth rating star can wait, three bucks is not worth the time that it would take to do four hundred plus ratings, especially this first month as a swarm of members try to get across that line. There will be plenty of opportunity for me to get the bonus in the future, and that is all that counts as far as I am concerned.

And yes, I do find it comfortable that I do not need a cracked crystal ball to predict human nature.

Helium: Rating Star and Daily Earnings

The online writing site, Helium, is constantly tweaking their system in their efforts to keep good writers involved. Late last month, they announced a few changes to the way that they were paying writers starting November 1st.

Now, I am still a little confused; but I do believe that I understand what the changes actually were.

The biggest change, provided that I am understanding it correctly, is that in order to be able to collect your share of the pennies, you have to maintain at least one rating star. If you lose your rating star, for every day that you do not have one, no earnings for that day. (Helium calls it revenue share.)

Now, a while back when the idea was first trotted out, it was met with some opposition. Some thought tying earnings into ratings was a bad idea. Myself, I saw the writing on the wall---Helium had finally figured out how to force its writers to actually rate other people's articles.

Fortunately, it is tied into the rating star and not the writing star.

I have no luck at maintaining a writing star; I am an opinionated writer and many of my opinions have tanked. While one is not supposed to allow one's opinion of another person's opinion affect their ratings of their articles, it does happen.

It is really easy to maintain a rating star on Helium. Or at least, I find it easy to do. You have to do forty quality rates every ninety days to maintain one star. If your percentage of quality rates is 75%, then that is only 54 ratings that you need to do every ninety days.

Myself, I am a binge rater. It is something that I do when I want to work, but am too tired to actually do so. The day right after I learned of the change in policy, I had my rating star (and I started out with no ratings done at all).

There is also a good chance that by the end of next month, I will have five rating stars (a three dollar bonus at the end of every month that you have five rating stars). Though it should be noted that it is not because I am after the three dollars, but rather I am going to be really tired at the end of this month between the term papers and the NaNoWriMo.

So is it a good thing? Depends upon who you ask. If you ask the writers who just wanted to toss some articles up on Helium without ever doing any rating, then you are going to get a no. If you ask Helium, then it is a yes. And if you ask me, it makes no difference---I was using rating to keep myself considered active there anyways. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.

I would rather...

Yesterday, I was reading a post on Mylot, which led to a member's profile, which in turn led to an article on Associated Content about how to make residual income off the internet. And it caused me to realize that I have a disease that prevents me from making the big happy buck.

It is the disease that prevents me from using my social network to sell cell phones, long distance service, dietary supplements, jewelery, and Amway. It is the disease that makes me have friends, and not potential clients and customers.

It is the disease that makes me refuse to do things that all the internet and pyramid gurus say is the proper way to conduct business.

The disease is "rather-ism" coupled with a streak of honesty. And it is fatal to my money making potential.

I would rather have my Associated Content in-article links go to my other AC articles, the articles of my friends, and the occasional brilliant piece that one finds there, than to have the links go to my referral programs.

I would rather spend my time writing useful, and hopefully witty, articles than spend my time writing advertisements and self-promotional pieces. I would rather work for the college newspaper than write websites promoting e-books on marketing.

I would rather spend my time on MyLot gossiping and having fun, and leave the bait and switch tactics to others. I join sites to have fun, not to drive people into pyramid schemes.

I would rather have a simple profile, with only a couple of links leading off-site, than have a profile that makes Times Square and Grand Central Station look quiet and lazy. I understand the purpose of banner ads; I just don't want to wear one.

And I would rather have you laugh at this posting than be upset that I tricked you into a commercial.

Call me naive, unambitionous, lazy, unrealistic; but I would rather keep my honesty and my current reputation than become an internet millionaire.

Helium Front Page Results

Last week, as my regular readers know, I made the front page on Helium. It is not the first time that I have made the front page; I have done it twice before. Once with my review of the TV show “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader,” and once with a humor piece about me ignoring my wife’s hints that the house needs to be cleaned.

I have always heard (read) on the community boards on Helium that making the front page is good for some extra earnings. Past experience on my end has resulted in just a couple of extra pennies, and a rush of competing articles that demoted my own article rank inside of its respective titles.

Until last week, that is. My article on “How the FICO 08 will affect your credit score” was the first time that I saw that making the front page does make a difference in one’s earnings. Before this point, making the front page was merely for my “ego department” as Eddie Izzard would describe it.

When I logged in that day, I was surprised by the spike in my earnings. I had looked at my Helium earnings late the night before because I was approaching one of those magical markers, and I was three cents short of it. So there was no doubt in my mind that I had an earning spike.

I didn’t immediately realize why. I had looked at the front page with a plate of eggs in one hand, and a cat crawling onto my lap trying to get them. It wasn’t until I checked my email that I learned that I had a front page article.

So what did I learn from this front page earning spike? That writing on Helium, like everywhere else, is all about Content, Content, Content.

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.

Three thousand reads on Associated Content

Yesterday, I crossed the line of having three thousand reads on Associated Content. As always, I am interested in what articles are getting read and what are not. Especially considering that I have only been submitting stuff there for a year, which sounds bad until you realize that I only submitted my eleventh AC article today (actually twelve, but my most recent gambling article is still awaiting review).

My first article there, A Brief History of Golden Dawn, has been read 250 times. As I have mentioned before between Helium and AC, it has been one of my best earning articles.

My second article, submitted five months later, about a speech Hillary Clinton gave at the Auraria Campus has been read 850 times. I figure that article is near the end of its economic life; it is only a matter of time before she drops out of the Presidential race.

The real surprise is that one article, on how the FICO 08 affects your credit score, accounts for over nine hundred of my page views there and is earning more on AC than it is on Helium. It is not surprising that people are reading it; what is surprising is that I am earning more from it on AC than Helium.

(Of course, my Helium earnings are currently in a slump. That is one of the dangers of "revenue sharing." When ad revenue is down for the website, so are the writers earnings.)

Normally, I make about the same from articles that I am double-dipping with, but not in this case. It is something that I need to explore further this summer as I start to expand my article base on both sites.

One of the things I have to do is replace my two political articles that are near the end of their economic life. The Hillary article I already mentioned; the other about the 2008 State of the Union address seems to have already hit the end of its lifecycle. Or at least, it hasnt been read by anyone this month.

But I got plenty of time to do this considering that the most important thing I have to do this summer is transfer to a different college; the rest of my summer is going to be spent on the yard and house repairs in between writing material for the internet and the lodge.

MyLot Referral Earnings Bonus Program

[This post is about a bonus prgram that MyLot did in 2008.]

One of the ways that a lot of the people who make decent money on the internet is though referral programs. Many sites pay members to refer others to the site. Most often this payment is based on the activity of the downline (members that you have convinced to join the site also).

MyLot is one of the sites with a referral program. Normally the amount MyLot pays for a referral is 25% of their participation earnings. For instance, for every ten dollars they earn, you would get two dollars and fifty cents if you were the person that referred them to the site.

As I said, normally it is 25% there--at the moment MyLot is having a bonus program going on. Between now and May 31st [2008], the referral income is 50% instead of the normal 25%.

It is all an effort to encourage members like myself to use their new flyers. An example of what they are encouraging us to use is as follows:

Meet other writing fans on myLot.

So if you are good at getting referrals, or think that you might be good at it, now would be a good time to join MyLot.

MyLot Earnings

For those of you curious about how much MyLot pays, yesterday I hit my thousand discussion (aka responded to or started a thousand discussions) which brings my earnings up to $14.90--or .0149 cents a discussion. Note that this is just my current overall average; you have to remember that when I first started out on MyLot, I was only averaging a half penny per post. So my average has improved as I learned more about the system.

Mylot Referral Link

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.