Back in 2000 I made a pretty decent income writing for Themestream. Overnight,they simply disappeared,without a trace. No “dear writer”letter of goodbye or anything. Their pay scale was nice,10 cents per page view. Perhaps that’s what put them under. At the time,it didn’t kill us that my $1200+ per month income had disappeared overnight. Mostly what I was angry about was the fact that all my articles had disappeared,too.
So today I feel like I’m reliving all that with eHow being down. It’s not just my internet connection,I’m able to connect to other sites. Someone is tweeting about the eHow outage. Is it an outage,or are they gone?
Percentage-based revenue sharing is a far more intelligent business model. I have a lot more confidence in that method than a ten-cent-per-hit system. Even the sites that pay per hit,like Bukisa, are using a using an index that’s based on a percentage of the site’s revenue. Granted $3.40 per 1000 page views is a lot less than 10cents. There’s a reason Themestream is gone.
There are advantages and disadvantages to a flat-rate fee schedule,and I’ll share those in my next post.
Hopefully the old owner will win a large sum in the lottery,email us all our old content and then send a check for the amounts owing. Perhaps he’s been beating himself up about it for the past 9 years.
Until then,I will use the lesson I learned,and back up all of the articles I have on other sites. I’m looking for an easy URL-based backup system. I like the idea of bookmarking a page for backup and having everything else be automated. I’d like to keep my backups organized by site,so if one goes down or disappears,I can instantly repost my work elsewhere. Any ideas? What backup system has worked for you?