In January of 2006, Paul Edmondson, Jay Reitz, and Paul Deeds left their families and fiancés behind and moved into a three level house… This is how the story of Hubpages.com begins. After a lot of hard work the website was published on August 5th 2006 which is roughly 3 years ago now.
Today I constantly see new topics on forums asking if it is a good idea to give it a chance and make money with hubpages. Instead of constantly continuing to explain why it is a bad idea I decided to write this post and simply refer to it in the future. Hopefully you will add more information as time goes by.
What is Hubpages?
According to their tour – hubs are just like web pages. Each hub contains an article you write about a preferable topic and after you publish it you will receive 60 percent of the impressions. If you are unlucky all of the clicks will be on their advertising and result in you not getting any revenue. This is highly unlikely though but yet possible.
Why it is a bad idea
1) Few can live on it – This is actually something related to blogging. Unfortunately I can not find any articles at this moment proving my point but maybe you can help me? If I remember correctly less than 6 percent of all bloggers make enough money to be able to live on it. Most of them are companies. Unfortunately there are still rumours on how easy it is.
2) It is not your site – Because of this they can delete your account without any good reason. If you get banned from AdSense you can find new advertisers but if you get all your content removed you will lose all your income meaning you will have to start all over again.
3) Hubpages can be banned – More and more people are starting to create small hubpages filled with worthless information simply to rank high and make money. Hubpages will probably loosen their leash to make more money resulting in more spam and eventually Google will have to deal with it.
4) No site will be here forever – Remember I told you about Geocities last month? When Geocities came along everyone used it but eventually it got old and there was new and better techniques. This will happen with Hubpages and the question is when. If you create a couple of thousand hubpages, sit back and retire it might work for two or three years. Then people will stop using it and all your time will be thrown away.
5) Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket – Basically what I am trying to say is that you should not put all your eggs in one basket. Personally I am making money by blogging, niche sites, Twitter, web development, consulting and search marketing. Within a few years some of these jobs will be gone but I will continue to make money since I got backups as and constantly continue to finding new methods to make money.
What about Squidoo then?
Truth to be told I have never tried Squidoo and its lenses but according to posts and books mentioning the subject I understand it is basically the same thing and therefore the same arguments applies for this site.
Prove me wrong
As always this is only my side of the story and since I would love to see people benefit in the future from this post your comments are highly appreciated. Tell me if I am right or wrong and also explain the reason to it.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Nothing resonates more with me than ‘it is not your site’. If you are going to use Hubpages then use it as a secondary place to share your content with the first place being your website or blog.
You’ve raised some valid points Stefan.
Karl
I feel the Same about Hubpages as it is way too easy to get unpublished. Also if you Create a good Blog that Gets much Traffic you Can Sell it I do not think this is Possible with Hubpages.
I don’t see why someone wouldn’t want to own their content. Buying hosting and setting up wordpress is not hard or time consuming. That is the route most bloggers should take. If that is too hard, use blogger.
Good points.Nothing beats having your own blog and writing your own content regularly.I make hubpages regularly and link back from them to my other blogs (I do deeplinking).The passive income is nice, but I constantly look for other options as well.As you said, things will change eventually.
This page was very informative. I look through the lens of a professional writer, but also have had some insight towards the business reasons HP is a bad idea.
I was permanently banned from Hubpages after a troll continued to harass me there for 10 months. I complained numerous times, only to find myself banned with the troll when I tried to defend myself or get rid of it.
I highly recommend anyone with an eye towards professional writing or business do NOT join Hubpages, therefore. The only thing you will ultimately gain is a headache from all the childish games–from both management and some of the denizens (trolls) they allow onto the site that call themselves writers. The outlook of the site does not seem professional, but rather childish and clubby as far as moderation (if any real moderation there exists).
For some time now, many friends from the site have been noting what you say here…that quality is way down. Trolls and others copying text seem to be valued there more–or at least seen on an equal basis (?)–as quality writers.
Lita Sorensen was banned from HubPages because SHE was the ACTUAL troll.
She was very lonely and harassing men constantly. She is on psychiatric medication for her mental illness.
This is why the staff at hubpages banned her PERMANENTLY!!
HP is very generous, they only ban people for a few days as a form of punishment. But they made an exception in Lita Sorensen’s case because of her extremely offensive behavior.
It is best to IGNORE trolls like Lita Sorensen!
I wrote for Hub Pages for nearly two years and enjoyed it for about one. For about the last seven or eight months I was there I frequently considered pulling my content because of the problems Lita mentions as well as other frustrations. I had over 200 hubs up though and was making some money on them. In 2009 I made just under $800 in Google revenue off Hub Pages alone, and maybe $50 in Amazon commissions. So, since the stuff was already up, I dragged my feet about pulling it.
November and December of 2009 I went from $100 or thereabouts in revenue each month to $2 or $3. I guess I was one of the ‘unlucky’ ones all of a sudden, but it struck me suddenly how little transparency and how little control there was over how payouts worked and revenue earned. A lot of deception is built into their business model IMO. They don’t really care about their writers, they don’t care about quality, and they don’t want YOU to make money, they just care about THEM making money–that’s why they get so fussy about affiliate links and ‘overly promotional’ hubs. It seems to me that if you’re getting free content you’ve got a bit of nerve being snotty about what kind, but oh well.
Really I’d just gotten to the point where I was taking myself more seriously as both a writer and a professional. When I started there it something fun to do and I like the people. By the time I pulled my content I was earning my living writing and I wasn’t enjoying it and wasn’t making money either. Plus, the place had gotten infested with trolls, many of whom seems welcomed by site managers.
Maybe one person in one hundred will actually ever make any money at Hub Pages and that person will work hard for what they earn and HP will get a big chunk of it. I think it’s pretty deceptive to advertise the site so heavily as a kind of ‘second job’, and the quality of both the articles and the community has suffered from this commercial push over the last year.
The best advice you give here is, don’t put your eggs all in one basket. I write for several sites, have a couple of blogs, and do freelance work and write for paper publication. Things change constantly and I’ve had to learn to cut my losses without regret and do it fast whenever something goes sour.
I do think Hub Pages is going sour fast. I would not recommend it to anyone wanting to make money writing. If you must write for a revenue sharing site, look for one without a forum full of trolls and self-proclaimed experts, and don’t put anything really good on the site, because you can probably make more on a good piece some other way.
About Hubpages revenue split 60/40. I made an experiment which really puzzled me: I published a few articles on hubpages. In 3 months I had one click on Google adsense ad which showed my earnings at $0.12 for this click. I was surprised that it was so low… My friend suggested another website (cannot tell you the name of this site just yet) which also has adsense ad share option. I posted a few articles on this site and soon got an adsense ad click. I checked how much this click earned me – and it was $1.16. More than a dollar difference between Hubpages and this site I used for the same type of ad clicked! This made me wondering why the same type of ad on Hubpages paid so much lower. How do they manage to do it? Any suggestions? Anyone had similar comparative experience?
HubPages is allowing extremely offensive articles and forum posts/threads to be posted and it makes one wonder if the administration actually enjoys seeing these because they will not remove even the vilest stuff. A lot of this is religious bigotry type postings, some examples being ones calling Jesus Christ a child molester and a homosexual and a particular article in which a member there has articles up saying the f-word to the Holy Spirit, etc… I can understand opposing viewes against Christians or any other faiths and religions but they are going way too far in what they are allowing to be posted under the quise of debate or disagreement. They are attacks of the worst kind and the site should be called into account for it.