What's the Best UGC Revenue-Sharing Site? InfoBarrel

The most recent 1-month Quantcast graphs for HubPages and InfoBarrel.

I peruse the HubPages forum fairly regularly. Today was particularly amusing. 

First, an author made mention in the HubPages forum that his article had been "edited by an unknown party." He mentioned, "The body of the text also appears to have been edited heavily." And further along he confirmed traffic "appears to be down by 50% right now."

That seems about right, according to the information I collected about the "new" Editor's Choice program. And yet again, this author wasn't consulted prior to these major edits by ?

Compare this "policy" to InfoBarrel:

a) InfoBarrel has human editors. They might suggest an edit, but they won't rewrite your work.

b) InfoBarrel site owner, Ryan McKenzie, knows what it takes to write a viral article. He wrote one himself. And not a fad diet or a trashy booze article, either. It's called 22 Habits of Unhappy People.

I cannot find any evidence that the Edmondsons or their "mystery editors" have written a viral Hub. This might explain why they do not understand the personal, intimate connection writers form with their work. I mean real writers (not content spinners and plagiarists).

Later, I read a post about Amazon sales. The OP (and others) wanted to know more information about returned items. He mentioned that on Squidoo, they "let us know right away what sold. Why does HP [HubPages] keep this info secret?"

Indeed, why is that? 

Amazon refuses to inform me what my fair share of royalties are too (from my 277 articles illegally posted on HubPages). And of course, HubPages isn't going to come clean (even though my email address is exactly the same as it was on Squidoo).

The answer from Matthew Meyer (HubPages Staff) was: "Amazon sales report will display sales that occurred during your share of impressions. If it occurred during the HubPages share if [of] impressions, then it will not be on that report."

That didn't really answer the "why does HubPages keep this info secret" part, does it.

Today, an author who writes on both HubPages and InfoBarrel wanted more info too. He (or she) mentioned having "a lot of products that didn't ship" and naturally s/he "wanted to know why." So far, this goes unanswered.

But the glaring problem that still exists on HubPages is the lack of social sharing buttons. As I mentioned in my blog post yesterday, Marina Lazarevic, Product and Quality Manager for HubPages, made clear that this was not an oversight. They chose to exclude these buttons from mobile and tablets. 

At one point, yesterday, Lazarevic appeased an author by promising to "reconsider" this decision. 

However, today she was firm in her response to him, stating: "When I said we would consider it, I didn't mean it would happen that day." And she added they "plan to consider social buttons on mobile for Q3 of this year. Our Q2 (April-June) schedule is already packed with other projects."

Oh what might those projects be? Selling HubPages? Could that explain why you are retiring HubPages Video? Less storage space for a buyer to worry about, right?

But hey, I learned one more thing today that might point to a possible advantage for scrapers and content "buyers." There seems to be an unnatural delay for featured Hubs to appear on authors' profile pages - but even more disturbing - until the NoIndex code on these articles is removed.

If you are looking for a new site to write on, InfoBarrel has been my writing home for 15 months. I routinely earn 90% of the ad share by maintaining 31 or more points per month. Not only is traffic soaring on InfoBarrel, but the new version 4.0 of InfoBarrel is due out in the next couple of months.

Take a peek at where author information and social sharing buttons will be located: