Update: Whoops! I had a feeling I’d caught my Yahoo! Contributor Network pay just as they were transitioning payments. Turns out I made $75, not $15, last month from YCN. Thank you Jesus…off to pay bills.
Brian C. Hopkins strikes First Person gold with Yahoo Contributor Network
I just tripped out and my mouth kind of hung open as I checked on my latest Yahoo! Contributor Network (also known as Associated Content) earnings for the month.
Granted, I don’t write nearly as often for them as I used to back in the days in 2006 after I first discovered “AC” — as we used to call the now “YCN” — and began writing hopeful stories that made anywhere from a few bucks to $50 for one piece up-front when I interviewed Robert Scoble about the Zune versus the iPod.
These days I don’t even know if there are any more up-front pay pieces — I usually hop on there to check just how much I can expect coming into my PayPal account for the month, hoping and praying it’s enough to cover my tithes and student loan bill of around $75 each month. (Almost paid off there!)
Anyhoo, it used to be more than enough, sometimes $200 bonuses for the month — usually falling around $120-ish per month — gaining all that ad revenue from the articles I’ve written over the years. The Beyonce one about the Master Cleanse diet that helped her lose 20 pounds used to have such a prominent ranking without me even touching it. It would rake in the bulk of the monthly pay. Let’s see where it ranks now…
No, that’s weird, the “Beyonce Master Cleanse” and “Beyonce Master Cleanser” still ranks very well, so I don’t know why the ad revenue is down so much.
I was surprised to see my estimated earnings at $15 coming in May 2011. (I was wrong, it was $75!) I removed the “Associated Content minus tithes $67″ estimated entry I put in my Excel spreadsheet and left it at nothing for the moment. First time I have done that in years.
Blame the Google Panda Farmer update…I guess?
Initially I blamed Google’s algorithm update for this change — we all know it affected AC and Examiner and other places. But I didn’t lose ranking on my pillar article, so that’s weird. I guess I could go back and try to compare pageviews, because that graph was definitely downward, so ad revenue goes down with it.
Never one to give up, I just look for new opportunities when the road curves to continue to profit online, like…
I’m going to try the “First Person” Yahoo! Contributor Network” writing assignments to see how much they pay…
…like this article by Brian C. Hopkins that I found trending hard on Alexa.com that was published yesterday, and is being seeded across the web, most notably in Yahoo Finance.
After reading that and see what how much attention his other Associated Content/Yahoo articles are getting as a result, I just popped into my Yahoo! Contributor Network dashboard (after linking it up with my Yahoo sbcglobal.net email account to my Associated Content account and former password) to see if there are any interesting “First Person” assignments I want to write.
Didn’t see any today, but I’ll keep it in the back of my mind to check now and again — and then write their socks off with a great article, and see if (please Lord!) can get seeded somewhere prominent like Yahoo! (or AOL? Do they seed articles there? Trying to remember where Tim Armstrong is and who is the competition with whom…) and see how much ad revenue a viral piece can draw.
Hey Brian, do you publish your Yahoo! Contributor Network pay and other online income anywhere on your blog? Let us know, thanks and congrats!
