Has anyone written any articles for Suite 101 and actually gotten paid for them? Are they legit or do they just accept anyone who signs up and pay them pennies or zilch? Any advice on this would be really appreciated as I’m considering applying.
I looked at it a while back and it seems to dodgy for this professional writer. Far better to get yourself out on the freelance circuit or mediabistro or something and try to get it going.
I’ve been a writer there for more than a year, and when I say that, I mean I’ve written a grand total of 22 articles. They used to be more strict about who they accepted. Editorial standards have slipped in the last few months.
If you’re good at writing articles that will get a lot of hits, you will get paid pretty well. If your articles don’t get hits, and no one clicks on the ads…let’s just say that over time, I’ve been paid an average of $5 per article (some articles have been up since 2008), and usually make about $3 a month. Some people do really well there, some don’t.
Suite put out a list of the top ten money earners for Oct. and number 10 had made just over $1,000. Suite says they have 10,000 writers on staff, but I would guess that out of that three or four make what I would call a living wage. But they pay on time, and for a site that only pays when someone clicks on an ad, they pay a lot better than other pay-per-click places. Just don’t expect to get rich.
I’ve moved on to places that pay up front, because I guess I can’t write to make advertisers and search engines happy. It’s a good place to learn how to get started freelancing, though.
Thanks both.
**Jonathan **- what was it in particular that seemed dodgy to you?
Quarter Lane - thanks for the very thorough reply. To be honest I was less concerned about making a a living wage from them than of finding a legitimate way to write professionally. I guess I just didn’t want to waste my time on something that turned out to be a scam. And if you don’t mind my asking, what are the other places you’ve written for that pay up front? Were you satisfied with them?
It’s the whole ‘write stuff and we’ll do our best to place it’ routine that seems dodgy to me. A professional organization is going to try to have articles to commission.
Get me, I’m not a newbie. I’m doing a monthly column right now for a national professional magazine and getting good money for it. And when I’ve written for international newspapers (WSJ and such) I get thousands per article. So something like this seems fishy to me.
Remember this variant on Niven’s Law:
Effort goes from the writer. Money flows TO the writer.
Any site that tells me ‘write and maybe you can get paid’ is the writing equivalent of Amway or some similar thing. And I’ve never been tempted by such things.
For the record, Niven’s Law for writers includes: Money flows TO the writer. Not AWAY from the writer.
He was advising young writers to beware of schemes that charge you to ‘evaluate’ their writing.
Thanks John. Do Suite 101 charge writers anything? I’d definitely run a mile from a setup like that. And I was under the impression that any article you write is autmatically published (once it’s vetted/edited of course) and that you get paid depending on the number of people that click from your article to any embedded ads. Is that right?
Suite101 is legitimate. They don’t charge you anything, and there’s nothing like “upgrade your account to gold membership for a small fee.” You write, they publish it, Google ads get put on the same page as your article, and if someone happens to click on one of those ads, you get a couple of cents. Suite pays via PayPal once a month and only if you’ve earned $10 or more. Like any revenue sharing site, you’re going to get paid peanuts for what you write.
Associated Content pays up front–sometimes. Again, they pay more for articles that are going to bring in people who click on advertisements, so AC has a weird system where they can pay up front and pay you for how many page views you get. They’ve just been bought out by Yahoo, so AC articles are getting put up on Yahoo’s front page now. I don’t know if that will improve the payment.
If you just want to write and don’t care about getting credit, there’s Textbroker. They have a list of assignments and the number of words needed for each one, you write something, they accept it or not. Payment varies. It can be anything from $7 for a long, thoughtful album review to $1 for 100 words of pure marketing crap. Places like this are called textmills, and they pay nicely, but you’re really just a ghostwriter for bloggers.
Demand Media Studios is for the writers of eHow and other places. They’ve paid me $7.50 for a 200-word article, but they are very strict, and you can only write an article on what they give you for a title, some of which are just stupid (“How to repair a Honda Motorcycle” in 200 words? Don’t think so). They seem to have been invaded by car and motorcycle mechanics, because that’s what 80% of the requested articles are about. But other subjects are available, and if you know anything about car repair or specifications, you’ll clean up.
And, um, that’s kinda a long post. Sorry.
I am also a writer, but here is my experience with Suite 101 as a consumer.
A few years back, I was devouring everything I could find about growing medicinal herbs and making herbal medicines at home. Suite 101 offered a series of classes on this particular topic. Back then, you subscribed for “classes,” paid a minimal fee, and then got a key code to unlock the content you ordered.
I found that the information was superficial, vague, and not really useful or informative in any way. The creator of this content did not respond to inquiries for clarification or more in-depth information. I found more information for free on gardening web sites and other places (like the library and the local native plant society). So I quit Suite 101 and stopped visiting the site.
When I look back on that as a writer, I don’t see it as a legitimate freelance opportunity because it’s clear to me that they’ll publish anything. I think that waters down the credibility of the information writers put up. There’s no expert review, no fact-checking, no content verification. Anyone can make anything up and present it as cold, hard fact. Do you want to drop your writing into muddy waters like that? I don’t.
If I were to write an article about medicinal herbs, for example, the last place I would try to publish is Suite 101. I’d go to herb magazines, e-zines, websites, and alternative medicine publications (digital and print) and try to sell it there first. Suite 101 would be offered if I couldn’t sell the piece to anyone else.
Frankly, I suggest WritersMarket.com. Get a Writer’s Market, check out their little magazine, and sell your work from there. Mediabistro is cool too.
Wow, Dogzilla. I haven’t heard about anything like that on Suite recently. I wonder if they changed the company or something, because now all their articles are free for anyone to read, AFAIK. I know they’ve changed a lot of things over the past year, so it’s not impossible.
Oh, I’m sure it’s a completely different website now. It’s been at least 5 years since I went there. They didn’t have paid ads back in the day, so it’s clear they’ve shifted the business model from paid content to free content supported by ad clicks.
I do not think this changes, improves, or detracts from the quality of writing either way. My point was, they’ll publish anyone, writing skills or no. I ain’t throwin’ my hat in that ring. 
I’ll agree with that. It would be nice to find a site with a strong editorial staff that could monitor writers, make sure only high-quality stuff got published, and keep a high respectability. If there is a site out there like that, I haven’t found it yet. Unfortunately, it’s all about SEOs and making money, and they only make money with content. Lots and lots of content. The more articles, the better. The more clicks, the better. But then, I guess it’s the same in print. It’s all about keeping advertisers happy.
Thanks again guys, and thanks Dogzilla. I think I’ll dip my toe in and give them a go, but will also give WritersMarket.com and MediaBistro a damn good look too. In the meantime I’ll continue to pen my short stories and flash fiction in my free time, and keep posting them on my blog and sending them out into the cold hard, uncaring world in the hopes of getting something published. 
And so it goes… the life of a writer. 
Yeah, 'ain’t it a bitch? 
Why do we do this to ourselves? I love the actual writing part, but sometimes it would be nice to have someone else read something I wrote and say “Hey, that’s pretty good!” Even better would be if they paid me for it. 
Suite operates under a system known as revenue sharing. They host your material and in turn share profits with you when people click on ads. I have 56 articles at Suite 101. I basically took articles I’d already written for other markets and repurposed them to suit Suite’s template. So far I’ve earned a mere $140 in total. Not worth it to me at all. Many writers have found the same problem. Revenues have been dropping for most writers for months. Right now I basically earn only $5 - $6 a month so I haven’t written anything at all for them for a long time.
The very best revenue sharing site I ever found was eHow. I put up about 500 articles there over from August of last year to April of this one. This month alone I’ve made about $449 without doing any further work. However, the open sign up and start writing revenue sharing program was shut down in April. Unfortunately far too many “articles” at eHow were written by spammers. The result was often complete garbage.
As of now you can only write for eHow through Demand Studios. I have an account with DS. DS pays either upfront or via the revenue sharing mode. The upfront pay is utterly horrible. You’ll find mostly $15 five hundred word articles, many on the most obscure topics imaginable. At five cents a word they’re very much on the bottom of the writing food chain in both pay and prestige.
DS does offer other more prestigious assignments from time to time but they tend to be equally low paying. I wrote a series of articles for USA Today at $20 per. The byline probably looks good on my resume but again the pay was excreable, especially after insane editing demands. They have similar projects with Hotels.com, the Houston Chronicle and Tyra Banks.
Other revenue sharing companies include Bukisa, Squidoo and Hubpages. You can sign up and start writing but you’ll only get paid if your articles make money.
If you really want to make good upfront money writing consider writing for the trade magazines. They pay much better and competition is typically lower.
More info can be found here:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=18
Absolute Write is an excellent source of information for writers. Many of the posters there are real writers. Not ppl who rite liek ths and think they can be writers but actually people with impressive publishing credentials.