Why I Stopped Writing for Helium.com: Reaching the Minimum Payout Has Taken a Year and Counting

July of 2007 marked an anniversary of sorts for me. On year before, in July of 2006, I signed up with a web site that was at that time called Helium Knowledge, located at heliumknowledge.com (It has since changed its name to just Helium and is located at Helium.com).

When I first signed up 12 months ago I was in between writing projects, and decided to go ahead and give Helium Knowledge a try. After all, what could I have to lose? 

Unlike Associated Content, Helium Knowledge offered no upfront payment for articles. I decided then to try writing a handful of articles, and see how much money they made for me after a few weeks to decide if the site was worth my time. In the first few days I wrote a total of eight articles for the web site.

I have to say, writing for Helium is an unusual experience. Their set up is unusual: while they say you are writing articles it is also somewhat like a message board, where people are writing in on a given topic which is based on a question. Anyone can add their own separate articles to your original article, and you can add your articles to theirs.

To try to get the feel of what it was like to write for Helium and what kind of payments were possible, I decided to write articles in a variety of different categories. Marketing and selling writing, online jobs, politics, computers and technology.

After writing these articles, though, I realized that writing articles wasn't the only part of working with Helium. All the articles on any given topic are rated: the most popular rated articles being at the top of the list, the least popular at the bottom. It was my job to rate articles to determine which were the best articles and which were the worst articles in the list. It was also made clear that the more articles that I rated, the more often my articles would come up when other people were rating articles: in a nutshell the more articles I rated the better my chances of having my article rated higher.

So I rated a whole lot of articles, in the hope that this would get my articles better rated. Once that was done I decided to sit back and see how much money my articles made by the end of the month.