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eHow.com Policy Change
On 5/5/11 eHow.com changed their agreement with their publishers and stopped paying a portion of the ad revenue as it had done in the past. They gave buyout offers to some of the writers and requested others to make copies of their articles before ehow replaced them with their own articles.
eHow is no longer a user published article hosting and revenue sharing site.
Article Writers Beware
This causes some to be a bit wary of web 2.0 article sites. The problem with eHow's
manner of handling this is that it poses a large financial loss to all of the writers that trusted this company and helped it to become a success.
As part of article marketing the writers spent far more time than that which is required to just produce the article. Successful article marketing also requires that the writer become part of the community of the website as well as link to the article pages so they will rank well in the search engines.
This interesting move by eHow.com and its parent company Demand Media, allows them to continue to benefit from the linking efforts of the writers and yet no longer have to pay them. This also shows a complete lack of loyalty to the people that helped to make them what they are today.
A Growing Trend
Unfortunately, this shows a growing trend adopted by some web 2.0 websites. These sites are starting to remove the incentives that made people want to publish articles with them in the first place. Article publishers understand that in time as links develop to a page the actual page URL has as much value as the original article, at time more because of the months or years it make take to make that URL rank well in the search engines.
This can be a devastating blow to authors that have spent countless hours developing content and promoting that content on a site based on an agreement with the site owner, only to have the entire source of income taken away when the company chooses to change their TOS.
So, Stop using these sites to publish?
No, probably not. But it does show that it is good not to “Put All Your Eggs in One Basket”. At this point there are no regulations to stop companies from doing this. Perhaps in time the internet will become better regulated and make companies accountable for their actions.
Until that time comes you have to understand that your work can become forfeit at the whim of the publishing company. By spreading out your articles and using linking methods that will allow you to re-point the links you will be able to ease some of the damage caused if your publishing site of choice decides to restructure or terminate its agreement with you.
Publishing articles on quality sites still provides a good way to provide links to your own sites as well as make some side income. It’s best not to allow a few bad apples spoil your opinion of the rest.