Comments on: The eHow UK Clone Issue is Still Here, and Growing.

By: Kimberly

Kimberly — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 02:34:25 +0000

Hello, Jack. The resolution with eHow was that they stopped their residual payments for any new articles and anyone who wants to write for them has to apply to Demand Studios. Sounds like Demand Studios is having big problems now (surprise!). Editors are now taking 5 or more days to approve articles, and PayPal has supposedly accused at least 20 DS writers of laundering money through DS–probably because they changed their name to Demand Media Studios or something along those lines, and PayPal doesn’t recognize it as a legit company. Well…ahem. They might have a point there.

Nonetheless, thousands of dollars are being withheld from writers who earned money through DS, according to the DS forums, and they say DS will not help. Not sure why I’m wasting time talking about such a sham company, except there might be one or two naive people out there who still think DS is the way to go.

That said, I’d recommend InfoBarrel and HubPages for residual income. It will take a lot of work and time. Or apply to LoveToKnow.com. They pay $20 per article and actually care enough to interview people who want to write for them. My experience with them has been very positive so far. Good luck!

By: Jack

Jack — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 02:20:43 +0000

I’m just beginning to investigate online publishing as a second income source, and was researching eHow when I came across this. Can you recommend any better companies?
It’s now six months since the last post. Any resolution yet?

By: Kimberly

Kimberly — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:05:56 +0000

Thanks, Preacher. Your words are accurate, and will help many others.

By: Kimberly

Kimberly — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:03:58 +0000

You pretty well covered it, Preacher. Hopefully our UK and Canadian friends will not buy into the same traps that eHow set for us, using bait and switch with a few early writers making decent residual income, then dropping the secret algorithm for later writers (which is secret for a reason, people, and InfoBarrel and HubPages can publish their forumulas, so can eHow) to a trickle, and finally cutting it off altogether. We can’t turn back time, but we can sure show the Brits and the Canadians that Demand Media’s scam tactics do not represent the way the US does business as a whole.

By: THE PREACHER

THE PREACHER — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 07:59:58 +0000

Hello, I am know as THE PREACHER and I am educating people to all of eHOWs dirty games. Lets talk a bit about those famous eHOW sweeps, shall we. Ever wonder what is really behind the madness? Yes, some are articles that are out of eHOW’s guidelines. Yes, some are poorly written. But many of these that get deleted are top earning articles. Thats correct, they are top earning articles, that have been in place for several years in many cases, only to overnight no longer fall within eHOW’s guidelines. How to hell can that be? What is really going on here?
Glad you asked. There is gold in your deleted articles, pure gold – for eHOW. I know, how can there be gold for eHOW in deleted articles. First let’s look at just what your high earning articles have accomplished. They have matured and rank high on the search engines. They have developed a following, in as far as online articles can develop a following. They have built up comments and views. And then eHOW comes riding in on its white horse and deletes em. All that hard work and effort is gone, right?
Don’t bet the family farm on it. EHOW wins on several fronts, and here is the secret to their dirty little game of deleting high earning articles. First, even though your articles get deleted, they are not totally gone, something very important remains behind and in eHOWs control – your URL’s. And therein is the gold, because eHOW takes your articles URL’s and redirects them to pages full of links to DS (DEMAND STUDIOS) so all your hard work and effort are now going to serve eHOW’s cause, promoting their DS articles.
These redirects are eHOW’s free bread and butter. The DS articles are already paid for, so all traffic they redirected to those articles is extra money in eHOWs pocket. An added bonus, they are now making money off the DS article ads and not paying for your articles any longer. Its win win all the way around. Another bonus, all your deleted articles comments. EHOW uses the strength of those comments to help drive the DS articles even higher in the search engines rankings.
This is why eHOW is never clear as to why your articles get deleted. In many cases, there is no reason they can clearly state and point to. Oh yeah, we deleted your top earning articles so we can make a pile of money off of them – nope, don’t expect them to answer truthfully on this one. But now you know, redirects of deleted articles spells gold for eHOW.

By: THE PREACHER

THE PREACHER — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 07:56:42 +0000

Here are the facts as THE PREACHER see’s them. EHOW is one of the buggiest sites you will ever write on. The publisher wizard they use is constantly breaking down, eating up half you articles steps, or freezing your articles in limbo so you can’t get at them and no one can read them.
Communication sucks. Day in and day out writers are asking the same questions and getting no answers. And when eHOW does respond, it is usually a warning threatening action against you and your account. No PR skills what so ever.
But as others have already stated on here, the UK site, eHOWs secret brain child, has split the community of writers right in half and has everyone going at one another’s necks. Secret, yes, their secret UK site. They secretly mirrored all U.S. writers articles onto both sites, without any of the writers permission to do so. they then made money off those articles, thousands upon thousands of articles, and told no one. When someone stumbled upon their secret site, it all came to a head.
EHOW insisted their UK site had caused no one any harm, and for a long time, refused to answer any of the writers questions. Many writers took down their articles, many left the site. Others threatened to leave, and finally ehow agreed to remove all articles of U.S. writers from the UK site. In the meantime, many U.S. writers found their once thriving articles had stopped earning. That’s right, eHOW, by mirroring the usa site over to the UK site, had messed up the url’s, so many LOST A LOT of money during this time. Ehow then insisted all U.S. writers articles were no longer on the UK site, and that the profiles would be removed.
As it turned out, many articles were removed, but many more were not. Not only that, but all newly written articles here in the USA were still being cloned in the UK site. So where are we today? Well, the articles are finally removed, but ehOW still refuses to compensate U.S. writers for all the actually money they lost while their articles stopped earning. EHOW instead came up with what they called a generous compensation, not for money lost from all this, but for what they deemed the value of each writers articles were during the months the entire UK thing unfolded.
Say what? So many writers generous compensation came to under $10, many more recieved under $!. But how could that possibly be? We are talking about writers who had hundreds of articles and who lost hundreds of dollars? Easy to explain, the values of the U.S. writers articles were not worth spit during that time, because eHOW killed their article links when they mirrored the two sites together. They continue to refuse to compensate U.S. writers for all that lost income, even though eHOW profited from those articles. Remember, U.S. writers were paid nothing for their articles while they were on the UK site, but eHOW had ads on those articles and pocketed all the earnings.
The latest news is that outraged writers are demanding that their UK profiles, placed their from the U.S site without the writers permission, be removed. EHOW has said NO. U.S. writers are also demanding the right to edit those profiles, which contain their personal informat. Again, eHOW today has said NO. I would strongly recommend that no one sign up at that site. They will steal your articles, and your earnings, and not give it a second thought.

By: JadeDragon@innovativepassiveincome

JadeDragon@innovativepassiveincome — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:39:24 +0000

Congrats on hitting #1 on Google for the search term “ehow uk” outranking ehow’s uk site itself.

By: Kimberly

Kimberly — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:05:48 +0000

Thank you, Alrady. Readers’ opinions based on fact and direct personal experience and reasonably stated, such as yours, are all welcome here. I appreciate you taking the time to offer your views.

By: Alrady

Alrady — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:42:38 +0000

I have met ehow staff and ceo and have no indication that they would be that deceptive. I know there must be good reasons for the happenigns but wish that communication was better.

When people post on the forums they are wanting answers or something that is reassuring that their time and efforts are not being wasted. I know that waiting weeks for an answer is very frustrating (been there done that).

On the other hand I don’t jump and immediately suspect ehow of evildoings. Which is why I am waiting to address this on my blog. I tend to be fairly impulsive .

This post here is very well done and is at least attempting to make sense of a situation that is unclear to many. Well done article and I hope that ehow sees it. I like how you compared changes day to day. Awesome. I wish I knoew more about Google search.

By: Kimberly

Kimberly — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:44:23 +0000

Sadly, it seems they are ignoring their users. If you read this LA Times article, you can start to see some of the possible strategy behind the controversy. I believe Demand Media wants to get rid of its residual income writers, but they also need them to stick around on the forums and groups. If all the residual writers left the site completely, traffic would drop significantly.So they seem to have found the ideal solution: make the publishing interface just glitchy enough to slow down the residual writers, while quickly filling the niche titles up with pre-paid Demand Studios articles. This keeps people talking in the forums and generating traffic, and also keeps them too busy to write as much. Pretty clever, if that's the strategy. Then create a cloned site and start moving the article copies to that server. This slows down users who delete their articles, which eHow can technically keep and use for six months. Brilliant, really.