Howtoee.com Not A good Place to Go...

[Tomspy77]

Was looking around at some job listings and found this site here:
http://www.howtoee.com/write-make-money/

This page and the home page looked too good to be true so I Googled around a bit and found this other page, which seemed to conform my suspicions:

How Toee — I am not going to post a link to this site because I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of providing an inbound link. I do however want to warn writers about this site. First, it appears to be a fairly new site, the domain name was registered on January 29. There are some serious problems with this site that writers NEED to pay attention to. First, they are posting for freelance writers and offering writers the opportunity to post “how to” style articles only. There does not currently appear to be a particular format that they prefer as the articles I read appeared to be largely “walls of text” with no formatting except paragraphs. I LIKE how to’s but they really DO have their own “format”.
That being neither here nor there….Here’s the problem: The site owner is offering writers $1.00 per article submitted plus AdSense revenue of 50 percent. There’s a bunch of problems though: On their sign up page here is what it says:

Are You Ready to Start?

• Sign up for an account for free.
• Login to your account and click on “My Advertising” at the top left side of the page, and enter your Google Adsense ID.
• Start writing.

Clearly they don’t know how AdSense works – if I add my AdSense account to the page then it’s my AdSense account that gets credited so how does this come up to 50 percent? I’m sure there’s an answer that I can’t find yet.
Next: This little gem:

You Understand That…

• The articles published on HowToee.com can not be published anywhere else later.
• The articles published on HowToee.com belong to HowToee.com and will be kept on this site as long as its owners and directors want.
• You can not promote affiliate links, adult and illegal websites on your articles.
• We reserve the right of approving/disapproving, and keeping or removing the articles and writers accounts.

Really? You are going to pay me the princely sum of $1.00 and some advertising revenue in return for my turning 100 percent ownership of my work over to you FOREVER? Really? Ya, thanks but no thanks – the two people who have submitted content on your site are likely the ONLY two who will or you’ll wind up with a bunch of garbage like other cheap paying sites. Have fun.
There is another important note here: Clearly this site owner doesn’t know Google AdSense rules: There is no term of service page nor is there any privacy policy. Expect Google to ban them if they don’t get this fixed sooner rather than later.

http://noscamworkathome.biz/cheap-ho...riters-wanted/

Just figured I'd drop a thread in here to warn people about it, apologies if this is in the wrong section, just trying to help. :-)

[herdon]

Honestly, I don't think the author of the critique from noscamworkathome.biz really knows what they are talking about in this regard. Questioning the use of AdSense? I believe that's how HubPages works. There are many ways you can do revenue splits with AdSense, including having some ads on the page belong to the author and some to the publisher and simply displaying publisher ads part of the time and author ads part of the time. (I think I also remember a way to have Google split the revenue.)

Also, the payment of $1 plus 50% of revenue probably beats most revenue-sharing content sites.

Everything under "You Understand That..." is pretty much the same as any content site, though the language isn't very good. Only the worst of the worst don't want exclusivity -- especially in this post-panda time -- and requesting perpetual publishing rights is smart for any content site that doesn't want to end up with a lot of 404 links coming from Google.

None of this is to say I'd trust a random eHow clone, which is what Howtoee appears to be, but the article's gripes seem to be more out of ignorance as to how that type of content site works.

[Tomspy77]

Granted, but looking at the site itself I am still a bit wary...

I also have never heard of splitting the ads on Adsense..but I will check into it.

Thanks!

[lindseyanne]

Seems pretty typical for a content site. I've seen ones that pay better and ones that pay far worse.

[Doreen Martel]

Originally Posted by herdon

Honestly, I don't think the author of the critique from noscamworkathome.biz really knows what they are talking about in this regard. Questioning the use of AdSense? I believe that's how HubPages works. There are many ways you can do revenue splits with AdSense, including having some ads on the page belong to the author and some to the publisher and simply displaying publisher ads part of the time and author ads part of the time. (I think I also remember a way to have Google split the revenue.)

Also, the payment of $1 plus 50% of revenue probably beats most revenue-sharing content sites.

Everything under "You Understand That..." is pretty much the same as any content site, though the language isn't very good. Only the worst of the worst don't want exclusivity -- especially in this post-panda time -- and requesting perpetual publishing rights is smart for any content site that doesn't want to end up with a lot of 404 links coming from Google.

None of this is to say I'd trust a random eHow clone, which is what Howtoee appears to be, but the article's gripes seem to be more out of ignorance as to how that type of content site works.

If you had bothered to read the post which you clearly did not, you'd see that my reference to Google was that the person had not read the the terms of service *because* they had failed to post a privacy policy and terms of service on the website, NOT because they were participating in Revenue Share.

I've been writing online for more than 5 years so I am *very aware* of how revenue sharing sites work, so the question was *never* whether they COULD share revenue but rather displaying my lack of trust in a site that didn't follow the rules.

Before you are criticizing someone for not knowing what they are doing make sure that you *learn to read*

[MacAllister]

Doreen, I strongly suggest you tone back on the level of aggression. There are ways to say "but that's not what I said or meant" without being deliberately insulting to another member.

[Billtrumpet25]

Originally Posted by Doreen Martel

If you had bothered to read the post which you clearly did not, you'd see that my reference to Google was that the person had not read the the terms of service *because* they had failed to post a privacy policy and terms of service on the website, NOT because they were participating in Revenue Share.

I've been writing online for more than 5 years so I am *very aware* of how revenue sharing sites work, so the question was *never* whether they COULD share revenue but rather displaying my lack of trust in a site that didn't follow the rules.

Before you are criticizing someone for not knowing what they are doing make sure that you *learn to read*

Your reference to Google? Where was that, exactly, as you are only shown to have made one post.

I'm utterly confused, but then again, that's me on a lot of things.

And by the way, welcome to AW.

[Ketzel]

Your reference to Google? Where was that, exactly, as you are only shown to have made one post.

Yeah, I'm guessing that Ms. Martel is the author of the critique that the OP cited. Her post seems to be in response to herdon expressing disagreement with her critique.

[veinglory]

And as far as I can see, herdon's critique is correct. Content sites routinely display the writer's Adsense code some proportion of the impressions, and their own for the rest. Anyone familiar with content farms (e.g. hubpages) would know that.

I am not saying that is a good deal, but it is far from evidence that the site in question 'Clearly doesn't know how AdSense works'.

I agree that not being able to remove the content at a later date is a bit of a deal killer. That is what bit eHow writers who have now effectively had their work appropriated and even attributed to other authors.

[Doreen Martel]

First off, the person that said this:

"Honestly, I don't think the author of the critique from noscamworkathome.biz really knows what they are talking about in this regard. ".....

I DO know what I'm talking about. And for the person who said "there are less aggressive ways" well this is a slam on my knowledge so how did you expect me to react?

My comment about Google in my post was simply this:
"There is another important note here: Clearly this site owner doesn’t know Google AdSense rules: There is no term of service page nor is there any privacy policy.:"

The WEBSITE HOW TOEE has NO TERMS OF SERVICE or PRIVACY POLICY...I never said that they were violating the TOS by offering revenue sharing, I was merely pointing out the fact that they were ignoring the Google TOS by NOT HAVING THEIR OWN TOS.

Seriously if you want to criticize my writing that's fine but don't read something that is not there.

In addition, if you had even taken 5 minutes to read the entire post AND the comments you would see that the site owner responded to the post and I approved his message. Good grief.....

[veinglory]

And -- "Clearly they don’t know how AdSense works – if I add my AdSense account to the page then it’s my AdSense account that gets credited so how does this come up to 50 percent?" which is what herdon was commenting upon, quite accurately.

[MacAllister]

Oh, yes. Let's DO get something clear:

That wasn't a request. If you can't be civil, you can't be here.

[Billtrumpet25]

Go Mac!



I've always wanted to do that.

Anyway...

back to writing for me.

[herdon]

Since I believe I was quite clear on how easy it is to split adsense revenue and because I never mentioned anything about Google's terms of use is , I won't give any direct response to Doreen.

However, I was curious on if I remembered correctly about Google offering a way to directly split adsense revenue without the need to code the split by switching out ads on the site. They do offer this ability through their API:

https://developers.google.com/adsens...revenuesharing