In the recent times, writing and content are very popular (Content is King!). Too many companies spring up from every corner offering content writers a place to publish, and earn some silly bucks from it, while they earn in millions. Associated Content is right there at the helm of this clan. In this article, we will try to find out these things…
- What exactly is Associated Content (if you don’t already know this)?
- Is it really worthwhile to work submit your content with them?
- Reasons why you should steer right clear of them
What is Associated Content (AC)
Associated Content (AC), The People's Media Company, is a website, in which you can earn money for the content (text, video, audio, or images) you submit. The content may be submitted by anyone from anywhere across the globe past the age of 13. But the payments are eligible once you cross 18 years of age. There are two types of payments: Upfront Payment and Performance Payments. Upfront payment, available only in the
Thousands of writers from worldwide are submitting content to AC, hoping to face success in freelance writing, and AC did a great job targeting them. But the fact that AC holds back from them the real revenues they earn from their content is deplorable and highly unethical for a business.
AC’s Unethical Business Practice
In AC, you are on your own to promote your content, in the way you like. You can post in forums of your content in AC, you can put a link into the AC page, or you can mention it in your mass email to your friends. From your promotion of the content, the AC website gets visitors. And generally from thousand impressions of a page with Adsense advertisement, the publisher can get at least a 100 clicks on their ads (besides Cost Per Thousands Impressions). From these clicks, the publisher can earn no less than 10 or 20 dollars. Anyways, you cannot go below 10 dollars. But with so nicely placed ads like in AC, and with proper Adsense ad selection techniques (which I may explain at a later article on SEO about), your content page may earn a fortune and will continue to do so.
In such a case, giving you $1.5 is extremely mean, don’t you, as the owner of the content, agree? You are far better off by putting that content in your own website and promoting it in your own way. You can build a brand of your own, get far more visitors to your site, get ad revenues as well as sales commissions from companies like Amazon and ClickBank if you have their widgets placed as well. All these would maximize your revenue and you will have no idea of the fortune they will make and will continue to do for the years to come. Compared to it, AC’s donation is nothing. So, I personally believe AC’s business practice is extremely unethical in that it hides from you the actual revenues it earns from your content.
Link Scam
As a means of promoting your website, you may submit content to other blogs, article directories and ad revenue share websites. In these sites, (e.g., isnare.com, ezinearticles.com, Hubpages.com, etc.,) you submit your content for the sake of a backlink to your website. The backlink is very important for your website, since getting so many of them can rank you very high in search results. In AC also, you can get any number of backlinks from your content (as opposed to some article directories, which give you only one or two backlink from a separate resource section in the article). But the problem with AC’s backlink is that they are all NoFollow, meaning you are none the better by having that link (please read this to know what is NoFollow and what is DoFollow). AC cheats you there as well, while encouraging you greatly to link to AC from your website (which they expect to be a normal DoFollow link). Here also, I frown on the unethical business practice of this company (in that they expect to get backlinks and promotion from you, while not even prepared to link out to your website in the proper way).
Telling Lies to You
Every time, AC, when it calls for content, asks content on popular topics and flaunts its market reach and the kind of exposure your content can get. They tell you that their network is huge (which is a fact) and you can get a great exposure. But a huge exposure means thousands of visitors per day for me, while AC cannot guarantee you one visitor to your content without your hard work on promotion.
Is this something good for good writers? In today’s world, one can be on one’s own. (S)he can publish and get paid good money for the content (s)he produces if (s)he chooses to. No one need promote an entire stranger like AC by giving their great content to them and promoting it as well. Also, AC asks you to put your effort to give them the best content you can come up with, without any grammatical or punctuation errors of any kind. If such content is placed on your own site, you will get all credit for it and money. While on AC network, their website will be deemed to be a good place for good content, and will get a hundred more visitors and subscribers to their whole site (due to your content’s value). And AC doesn’t recognize your part in this at all.
With such deep a network as AC’s, getting too few visitors to your content, unless you do proper promotion yourself, is something dubious to me. I strongly believe the contents get more visitors than they show you. I believe they are doing some sort of page view fraud, showing you far less a number than the actual.
Your Submission Rights to AC
You can impart to AC three different forms of rights. The first, which is the exclusive rights, means you dethrone yourself as the author of the content. You cannot publish the content anywhere else, and you give full rights to AC to publish it anywhere, in any form, with any modification or editing to create derivative works. So, you are completely submitting to AC the product of your toil for meager upfront payment and starving performance payments. Also, once published the article cannot be removed from AC at all.
The second form of publication is that you retain some rights, and you can republish the content in some other site. But you still give out all the rights of publication to AC and their partners and you cannot remove the content from the AC network. The little problem with this is that if you republish the content in your blog, it will be deemed as duplicate content by search engines and they will penalize your blog for that. While AC allows republication, they state it clearly that the content should not be previously published elsewhere (so that they are safe from any such penalization).
The third form of publication is that you retain all rights and give AC only the display rights. This way, you are eligible only for the alms (and not the ‘generous’ upfront payment), and you can remove the content any time you want.
AC recommends the first form of submission and has made it the default. Now friends, is it a good company that recommends you—the customer—the worst option, which may is the best option for the company? If you fall for it, then you are screwed like anything. The fact is that most people just go ahead and hit that submit button without realizing that they are selling their souls. Most really believe that the companies are ethical and they will not do anything wrong. Here, AC cheats you, and you cannot even blame them for doing it, can you? Is AC like your own child to get such tender, affectionate treatment from you?
The millions of dollars AC gets from ad revenues are all due to the content it gets from thousands of authors out there. All these authors submit their content to AC because they think it is a great option to make money writing online. But the fact that they are better off writing for their own website or blog is something forgotten by all; AC’s impressive design and reliable look can put haze on your eyes, beware!
If you are a good writer, capable of writing an article of the standard AC recommends, then the best course of action you can take is publish it with your blog first, and submit to AC in their third publication option retaining all rights for yourselves. An upfront payment is not something attractive at all. Also, I recommend screwing someone who screwed and continues to screw millions.
Also, submitting an already published content is not an option with the first two rights of AC. And there are thousands submitting for no upfront payment from outside the
My Thoughts
All in all, AC is cheating everyone by telling them that they are doing something great by publishing their content and giving them some money. The pain-evoking fact is that there are a million unsuccessful writers out there, who believe it to be a wonderful Internet career, and whom AC cheats really well. Publishing is an industry with a lot of scams and frauds. I hope you went through my previous article about Blogit, which is a scam company offering to publish your content for a fee.
I believe AC is a big scam and should be completely avoided if you are into writing. If you want to get some money for writing online, the best is freelancing industry; Constant Content is a company offering this. You can sign up for free with them and market your articles at your price. You can set the price of your articles here. Meaning, you can put up a brilliant 500-word article and you can charge anything like 50-100 dollars for that single article.
If it gets purchased, you will get 65 % of the sales amount. Plus you can have referrals, from whom you can earn. A wonderful business idea, profitable to both sides.
On the other hand, if you look at AC, there is no transparency of what is happening behind the camera. It sets a fixed silly amount to pay you for every thousand page views and you are expected and encouraged to do all the promotion. This means you are being employed by AC to write content for them and promote them, and you are given alms to do it all. And at the promise that your content will be seen by a wide range of people, you are cheated by them.
We people submit to article directories for a totally different reason now. It’s for backlinks to your blog or website. The fact with AC is that they are not even prepared to give a good backlink to your site by submitting to them the article and they are defrauding you further by giving you a fake NoFollow link option. Some people, who don’t know of DoFollow and NoFollow, may just submit so many articles to AC and be content with the belief that its high PR links would skyrocket their websites. Huge wastage of time. All work in vain!
Though with Constant Content, you are not eligible for any recurrent payments for the article you write, and from AC you may make more from an article in the years to come and when page views build up, CC is not an unethical business. They give you what they tell. They don’t fool you around with vague and vacant promises. It is why I suggest you to avoid AC: you have no idea how much you are valuable to them, but they are not prepared to accept your value at all.
Content is king! And you need it for great marketing and high sales. Unless you write good content, you cannot get high search ranking. Writing for AC, giving them your great content means you are promoting their website, enriching them further. For that, the ungrateful AC treats you like street dog by spitting their ort at you. You should never neglect the fact that they are growing on your back. If they thrive at your toil, they should be able to disclose their complete earnings from your work or at least be prepared to indubitably share the actual earning you deserve, like how ad revenue share networks like Hubpages do.
In Hubpages, you can submit your content and your Adsense ID. You are eligible for a percentage of advertisement revenue from their site. The advantage is that your Adsense ads will be displayed in your content (you can verify this by looking at the source), and the content you submit are automatically indexed by search engines and get high rankings, thanks to Hubpages’s high PageRank website. So, you are partnering and earning with them. Here in AC the difference is that you are working for them (in every aspect) and they are earning in thousands from your content, while you are looking up with alms in your hand. With Hubpages, the top members are earning in thousands from Adsense in a single month.
Recently I found a top member’s performance results in AC. She had about 300 articles in AC and had only around 300,000 page views. Means, she might have earned almost $3450 ($10 upfront payment plus 1.5*300 for performance) from these articles she wrote for which she might have spent about a year or more. What a waste of time! All her articles might have produced a million for AC in toto.
I may be the only person who raises these disputes about AC. AC, the People’s Media Company, is a highly respected content provider amongst us all, thanks to their content producers worldwide, who are willing to get published for anything. Usually, the person who raises voice against something big is but single. However, it’s eventually their path that all will follow (remember Copernicus, who said earth was orbiting the sun, and nobody believed him). I expect to hear a lot of comments and reproaches from the readers of this blog and others who pass by and check this article out. But I am prepared to say this anywhere. I believe the Internet has made the business far more transparent for us all than it was previously, and anything that faces away from this fact and cheats people like this swindler in priest’s dress should be smacked on the back until it falls off the cliff.
I wrote all this with a lot of love and affection for those unsuspecting writers out there. My heart goes out when I think of them all, who wasted their time in vague promises by companies like AC or Blogit. In fact, you should give some time to think of how much wastage of one’s life these companies can do really. They are telling you a fabricated story of great exposure and wonderful readership, while it’s nothing you get for the work you do. They could have written some great content for their own blogs and websites by this time and pulled it off real well.
While Blogit scams you by telling you that you will get a high readership and payments from the writings you do (while you end up paying them an amount every month), AC tells you that you can get paid (something silly) for the content you create. Also, look at those poor people who try to submit to AC for the sake of the NoFollow backlinks they can get. It is not illegal or wrong to give NoFollow backlinks, but knowingly exploiting the ignorance of people is a totally different thing, wouldn’t you agree?
It’s the world that grows crooks like AC, and it pays for it as well. So, friends, you had better leave AC and steer clear of their territory, if you are already part of them. I am writing this for the good of all the writers out there. Do your share of hard work for yourself or for those needy. Not for those already affluent cheats, who continue to swindle shamelessly for their benefit. You may make a worthless hundred-dollar bill from your hard work in AC for so many months, but a rusted cent you make from an ethical business is far more valuable than that.
[My apologies to my sincere readers for publishing this article so late in the blog; it’s almost tomorrow now. The preparation and research took some time, that’s why. Also, the content is too long; so, please let me know of any editing gaffes you may find.]
Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008
