Examiner.com - any experiences, opinions, suggestions?

peloton said:

I joined Examiner.com as a bio-diesel writer based in Los Angeles. But before I begin writing for them, I wanted some opinions of the benefits and detriments of Examiner.com. I know one detriment is very little pay. But beyond that does anyone onboard here have experiences or advice re. Examiner.com?

Here's a link to the Examiner site: http://www.examiner.com

Thanks.

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I belong. For four articles that have been out there for six months and counting I have accumulated a grand total of .29 cents. Yes, you read that right.

My DMS and Textbroker pays truckloads more than this outfit. I'm thinking about pulling out of Examiner. To me, it's worse than a joke. Others might have had better experience, but tell me, can you beat $400 a week. I don't think so.

tri

A couple of years ago, I reliably got at least 50.00 a month; when it dwindled below that, I bailed.

Unless you've got a very specific niche, I think you'd do better to have your own site/blog/nice that you own.

I've been there for several years. Don't ask me why. I can't think of any benefits and the pay is horrible. If I'm lucky, I might earn about $10 or $12 a month.

The Examiner is poison on the resume. I wouldn't bother. There are plenty of other mill opportunities.

Demand Studios
Textbroker
Blogmutt
Fiverr

Or, look for work at Odesk (sometimes there are some good paying gigs), or Elance.

I've been writing for examiner.com for a couple of years now. It was okay in the beginning, but it's only gone downhill from there. There's a $10 threshold you have to make before they'll pay you, and I usually just barely make it every month.
If you're already signed up then I would suggest writing a few articles and seeing what happens. But don't expect much. I mostly do it for fun, to write about subjects I enjoy reading/writing about and making a quick buck.

One of the big problems with Examiner.com is the staff has never really known how to put together a content site. I think it was a good idea that went really bad once they decided to become a content mill and go for quantity over quality. Even then, though, the big problem remains a staff that just doesn't understand the web.

Pay tanked because of Panda, and instead of doing what many of the smart players in the industry did -- purge bad content, remove duplicate content, concentrate on higher quality content, etc. -- Examiner.com tried to double down on producing more and more low quality content.

Because Panda establishes a basic rating for a site and applies it to the entire site, quality work for Examiner gets dragged down to the bottom of the search ratings because there is so much poor quality.

At one time I was making $500+ a month from them mostly from 'evergreen' content that required little new material each month. Nowadays it is around $50 a month. That drop has been entirely Google rating the site poorly because of all the bad content.

I'd definitely stay away. I doubt they'll ever learn how to run a decent site.

Does Examiner own all the rights after an author submits an article? Or do the rights revert back to the author upon online publication—and can the author then use reprint rights?