Associated Content

I have a few articles on AC. The pay was slavishly low then, and lower now. I doubt you could make a decent wage at it.

Associated Content page views started going downhill after the notorious Google Panda thing-a-ma-jig. (I don't know all the tech details.) Now Associated Content (which became part of the Yahoo! Contributor Network after Yahoo! bought AC), has been changed to Yahoo! Voices. They are weeding through old content that doesn't meet standards of publishing now so it looks promising that the content will improve. But page views are still horrible and I don't know when that might improve.

One of the benefits of writing (because the page view pay isn't a benefit, I assure you) is that you have the opportunity, after you've proven yourself, to get "beats" for various Yahoo! sites like Shine, Y!TV, etc. and you can apply as a Featured Contributor in different categories. Both of these will get you high dollar ($5 to $25 per article upfront) assignments. The downside is that it is VERY hard to get into those programs and you have to deal with writing on Y!Voices for very little pay for awhile before you'll even be considered.

I still write infrequently for Y!Voices but I have Yahoo!News beats that I regularly write on the Yahoo! Contributor Network.

I guess it all depends what your goals are. If you want fast pay, right this minute, you're out of luck, no matter where you try to write web content.

~AC/YCN contributor since 2008

Yahoo Voices is now what Yahoo is calling the writing contributor site that used to be Associated Content and they are still going downhill.

The site is trying to clean up and get better material but after years of allowing anyone to publish pretty much anything there is a lot of regurgitated articles that just repeat other stuff. There is also a lot of really bad and mediocre writing from a wide variety of authors that just clutter the site up.

Now all articles regardless of rights gets edited and the rash of poor explanation of editorial rejections have cleared up. Page views are way down thanks in part to pagination of articles from multiple pages to a single page which hurt page views as multipage articles would get a page view for each page.

I think but have no way to prove that they have also adjusted their own algorithms for counting page views as page views have really sunk low. I did see a slight lowering after Panda but this makes little to no sense that just a change from multipage to single page would sink page views as much as they have.

Many of my articles have been two, three and four pages but page views have decreased by way more than that sometimes eight to ten times as much. Many people are looking to other sites to publish on such as Examiner which seems to be the current hot site to publish for a few quick dollars.

AC is not a reliable source of income. I mostly use it as a second repository of previously published articles to which I still own the rights. Then I get paid per page view. They used to have an "upfront" payment option you could apply for, and I got up to $20 an article for that, plus page views, but they don't appear to have that anymore.

I've been an AC Millionaire for years now (which is a person with a million or more page views) and my monthly payments for work out there dropped from about $80 a year ago to $12 last month. If you are able to get some things on Yahoo News or Shine or one of the other Yahoo networks, you will get excellent pageviews and a reasonable payout for at least that month; for the right person, it's a good gig.

However, in order to get to that point you'll need to specialize, focus on one of the AC channels, and be active enough in the forums for that topic (commenting on other articles in that topic is also smart) that the editors take notice of you and recommend your articles up. I don't know who-all is still freelancing at AC, but I have noticed Carole Gilbert frequently has articles on Yahoo these days, and she is a very sweet and approachable person. If you look her up at AC and ask her respectfully and quickly for advice on how to do well there these days, I'm sure she will direct you to some good information.

I've used AC in the past before - it's been a pretty steady income source from time to time. Right now unfortunately there is something funky going on with my account and I can't access it. Technical help is "working on the problem" for about a month now.

They pay pretty well, and regularly too. They're good folks.

Laura

skylarburris said:

AC is not a reliable source of income. I mostly use it as a second repository of previously published articles to which I still own the rights. Then I get paid per page view. They used to have an "upfront" payment option you could apply for, and I got up to $20 an article for that, plus page views, but they don't appear to have that anymore.

Click to expand...

There was no "upfront" payment option to apply for. There is an option on all articles you submit to Voices whether you wanted to submit it as Non-Exclusive, Exclusive, or Display Only. They still have an upfront option for articles submitted as NE or E, but don't expect much above $5, if that. Is that a bad thing? No, because you also have page view bonuses.

Once upon a time (five, maybe six, years ago) AC paid slightly higher upfronts for all articles before they started paying page view bonuses and it's understandable that there are lower upfronts because of that. I don't know when you were writing regularly on the site but please don't mislead people to believe that you were getting up to $20 recently for the unsolicited random article. That hasn't happened in a long time and certainly hasn't happened in the last couple of years.

For any writing site like this, it is what you make of it. You're not going to make a lot of money straight out of the door with ANY writing. Just like with anything else, if you work hard and make a valiant effort, you'll accomplish what you want to accomplish. But don't write for just one site. Write for several, get your feet wet, learn what works and what doesn't.

And beware of what you read out there. Not everyone has accurate information.

Quick warning about Associated Content. I also was in the millionaires club on AC with over 400 articles when suddenly, they deleted my account for writing a weekly column about online poker. I messaged them and said, "Wait a second...I've written for you guys for years and I've been throwing up poker tips over a year now...what the heck is this about?"

They replied and said that Yahoo didn't want any gambling articles on their site so instead of having me take 10-15 articles down, they deleted my entire account and perma-banned me for breaking Yahoo's TOS (which I never saw, read, or agreed to after the merger). Needless to say, I was livid.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that AC is a great place to gain some exposure, learn SEO, and build a long-term reference. The pay stinks though and they really could care less about their actual contributors...so make sure that you'd don't accidentally cross one of their invisible boundaries.

I have a few content on AC. The pay was slavishly low then, and reduced now. I question you could create a reasonable salary at it.

Associated Content has never lived up to its money-making potential as far as I am concerned. I have 150 plus articles posted and yet having monthly dividends of more than five dollars is a good month. However, they were the first site I ever wrote for (they paid about $5 per article back then - 2007) and so they gave me a little extra beer money and also served as an excellent reference for getting better writing assignments.

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I've been on Yahoo voices since last year, and in that time, I've made a whopping $1.25. Don't bother.