Bad Place to Write
April 18th 2010 07:57
I recommended writing for Hubpages and then I quit.
For the first few moths I was really happy with Hubpages. They have gotten user friendly down to a tee and the traffic was not bad.It seemed like a really good site to write for. As of the beginning of April I was finally starting to make some money there with a few adsense clicks and a couple of Amazon sales. I even joined a 60 day challenge of writing 30 hubs in thirty days and then doing a group promotion for 30 days of those pages. My hubber rating was 95 out of 100. All in all things were going pretty well for me there.
I started to notice things though that made me feel uncomfortable, and towards the middle of April, I decided Hubpages was really not the writing site for me.
Mismatched Ads
The first thing that bothered me was the google ads. Sometimes they matched the content perfectly. Other times, well, it did not. Several of my hubs were geared to parents homeschooling preschoolers. Most of the times the adsense ads matched, but I began to notice something very unusual. If I clicked on my hubs at night, the ads were not related to my content. My free alphabet worksheet page had ads for semi-pornographic sites. I was not the only who noticed this discrepancy. It was happening to many of the writers. The answer given by staff was that when traffic was low the google content would not match the ads. Now I have been writing online a few years and have never seen this happen anywhere else. And Hubpages could certainly filter the ads, but chose not to. Here’s a link to a screen shot I took of someone else’s writing to give you an indication of how bad it was.
Inappropriate Ads (notice the unusual google ads in the screenshot and occasional even in my blog on any page that mentions this site)
Inappropriate Links
On the side of each hub there are links to other written work on the site. Sometimes these seem to be matched up fairly haphazardly. One writer wrote a hub about whether or not Christian people should undergo reproductive sterilization. This was linked to a hub that explained why vibrators were better than men. The first writer was humiliated and felt her integrity as a writer was being imposed on. The hubs also have links to the forum conversations, and the forum conversations are often......
Drama and Deceit in the Writing Community
The first thing you will notice in the hubpages forum is how very odd the conversations are. There is a lot of sex talk for a professional community. There is also a lot of personal attack. When you spend a little time in the forums you will also begin to notice a very interesting phenomena, the sock puppet problem. There are some writers on hupages who find it necessary to write different content under different names. All well and normal for writing. Most of us have thought of or have used a pen name at one point. The difference I and many others noticed was that these pen names were being used in strange ways.
The sock puppets were all having conversations with each other in the forums. One person would have 5 or 6 different sock puppet accounts and these sock puppets would be fans of each other, carry on conversations in the forum, attack people in turn, and defend one another. While you would at first believe these were 5 or 6 different people, you would soon come to realize that one person was behind all these personalities. You never know who you are dealing with on hubpages. You never know when you may find yourself under attack from the various sides of one or two personalities.
This phenomena is not kept within the forums either. Many of the hubs you will read have been written by one person with many different pen names who uses these pen names to comment on their own hubs and make the hubs look more important and popular than they are. Many people who write for hubpages feel a need to keep track of IP addresses to see who is commenting on their writing. A person they will think of as a friend will make a comment on their hub. They will then receive a demeaning comment from someone else and when the IP address is checked it will be the same person. Hubpages staff does little to stop the harassment of their writers by other members of the site.
This type of behaviour is extremely common on the internet, but once in a while you might get your hopes up for something better on a site that should be professional. If you can’t then you should at least be able to avoid the forums. On hubpages it’s just not possible. A good part of your hubber score (Karma to Orble writers) is based on participation on the site. This means reading and commenting on other hubs and participation in the forums. Without these ingredients you will find it very difficult to see your hubber score rise, and without a hubber score of 75, all your links are nofollow.
Recommendation Revoked
I wasn’t really involved in much of this drama myself, but it was extremely embarrassing to it associated with my own writing as it was through forum links on the pages I had written and the inappropriate ads on my hubs. I had backlinks removed from sites as these sites did not wish to be associated with the types of ads that were being displayed. What kind of educational site wants to refer its readers to a site where the adverts are for “Hot Tamil Actresses” “Indian Blue Movies” and such? None and neither did I. Despite the fact that I was beginning to make a very small amount of money on the site I really felt I would do better with my writing elsewhere, and probably with my earnings. The vast majority or writers on Hubpages make next to nothing.
Hubpages does seem to be a good place to write for some. I learned a lot from some of the more professional writers on the site. If you don’t feel like being caught in drama and webs of deceit, though, Hubpages would probably be a good place to stay away from until things get straightened out. And until they figure out how to get the ads to match the content. At the moment it seems less of a professional writing site, than a really bad soap opera.
For the first few moths I was really happy with Hubpages. They have gotten user friendly down to a tee and the traffic was not bad.It seemed like a really good site to write for. As of the beginning of April I was finally starting to make some money there with a few adsense clicks and a couple of Amazon sales. I even joined a 60 day challenge of writing 30 hubs in thirty days and then doing a group promotion for 30 days of those pages. My hubber rating was 95 out of 100. All in all things were going pretty well for me there.
I started to notice things though that made me feel uncomfortable, and towards the middle of April, I decided Hubpages was really not the writing site for me.
Mismatched Ads
The first thing that bothered me was the google ads. Sometimes they matched the content perfectly. Other times, well, it did not. Several of my hubs were geared to parents homeschooling preschoolers. Most of the times the adsense ads matched, but I began to notice something very unusual. If I clicked on my hubs at night, the ads were not related to my content. My free alphabet worksheet page had ads for semi-pornographic sites. I was not the only who noticed this discrepancy. It was happening to many of the writers. The answer given by staff was that when traffic was low the google content would not match the ads. Now I have been writing online a few years and have never seen this happen anywhere else. And Hubpages could certainly filter the ads, but chose not to. Here’s a link to a screen shot I took of someone else’s writing to give you an indication of how bad it was.
Inappropriate Ads (notice the unusual google ads in the screenshot and occasional even in my blog on any page that mentions this site)
Inappropriate Links
On the side of each hub there are links to other written work on the site. Sometimes these seem to be matched up fairly haphazardly. One writer wrote a hub about whether or not Christian people should undergo reproductive sterilization. This was linked to a hub that explained why vibrators were better than men. The first writer was humiliated and felt her integrity as a writer was being imposed on. The hubs also have links to the forum conversations, and the forum conversations are often......
Drama and Deceit in the Writing Community
The first thing you will notice in the hubpages forum is how very odd the conversations are. There is a lot of sex talk for a professional community. There is also a lot of personal attack. When you spend a little time in the forums you will also begin to notice a very interesting phenomena, the sock puppet problem. There are some writers on hupages who find it necessary to write different content under different names. All well and normal for writing. Most of us have thought of or have used a pen name at one point. The difference I and many others noticed was that these pen names were being used in strange ways.
The sock puppets were all having conversations with each other in the forums. One person would have 5 or 6 different sock puppet accounts and these sock puppets would be fans of each other, carry on conversations in the forum, attack people in turn, and defend one another. While you would at first believe these were 5 or 6 different people, you would soon come to realize that one person was behind all these personalities. You never know who you are dealing with on hubpages. You never know when you may find yourself under attack from the various sides of one or two personalities.
This phenomena is not kept within the forums either. Many of the hubs you will read have been written by one person with many different pen names who uses these pen names to comment on their own hubs and make the hubs look more important and popular than they are. Many people who write for hubpages feel a need to keep track of IP addresses to see who is commenting on their writing. A person they will think of as a friend will make a comment on their hub. They will then receive a demeaning comment from someone else and when the IP address is checked it will be the same person. Hubpages staff does little to stop the harassment of their writers by other members of the site.
This type of behaviour is extremely common on the internet, but once in a while you might get your hopes up for something better on a site that should be professional. If you can’t then you should at least be able to avoid the forums. On hubpages it’s just not possible. A good part of your hubber score (Karma to Orble writers) is based on participation on the site. This means reading and commenting on other hubs and participation in the forums. Without these ingredients you will find it very difficult to see your hubber score rise, and without a hubber score of 75, all your links are nofollow.
Recommendation Revoked
I wasn’t really involved in much of this drama myself, but it was extremely embarrassing to it associated with my own writing as it was through forum links on the pages I had written and the inappropriate ads on my hubs. I had backlinks removed from sites as these sites did not wish to be associated with the types of ads that were being displayed. What kind of educational site wants to refer its readers to a site where the adverts are for “Hot Tamil Actresses” “Indian Blue Movies” and such? None and neither did I. Despite the fact that I was beginning to make a very small amount of money on the site I really felt I would do better with my writing elsewhere, and probably with my earnings. The vast majority or writers on Hubpages make next to nothing.
Hubpages does seem to be a good place to write for some. I learned a lot from some of the more professional writers on the site. If you don’t feel like being caught in drama and webs of deceit, though, Hubpages would probably be a good place to stay away from until things get straightened out. And until they figure out how to get the ads to match the content. At the moment it seems less of a professional writing site, than a really bad soap opera.
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