What Is The Future Of Writing Articles For Income?

In the past few weeks the playing field for writers on "revenue sharing sites" has changed. Sites such as the one you are reading this article on, Hubpages, have had to tighten the rules for writers in an effort to improve overall content. The story has even been in the mainstream news and it means big changes for writers who earn income from revenue sharing sites. These changes have hit some writers square in their pocketbooks.

Why is this happening you may ask? The main reason that so many revenue sharing sites are having to enforce new, tighter standards, is that Google has changed the algorithm that its search engine uses. For many years the company was happy to allow "content mills" and "article directories" to flourish. It was a win-win situation for all parties involved. Google made money from selling ads, and members of those content sites made money from revenue sharing. In recent months there were apparently complaints from Google users about queries displaying too many articles from "content farms" in search results, and not enough relative results. Search engines such as "Bing" were beginning to lure away Google searchers to results that did not feature Adsense ads. Since the majority of revenue sharing article sites on the web use Adsense advertising, this was not good for Google, nor for writers who publish articles on those sites.

The Change Has Been Coming For A While

Many of the larger revenue sharing sites have apparently known that these changes were coming for a long time. Demand Media, owner's of eHow, was one of those companies who decided to abandon revenue sharing for its members entirely and begin tightening up content. Others such as Hubpages and Xomba have chosen to tighten up their ships, and try to encourage authors to generate better content so as to offer higher quality search engine results. The concept of a "revenue sharing site" is quickly being replaced with that of a "writing community" or "source of valuable information". This re-branding is a necessary step and members of online writing communities will have to adapt, or be left behind. No longer will a member of any revenue sharing site be able to make good money simply by using clever keywords or other methods to cause search engines to find their content on the web. Now a writer's article will have to offer something useful to the reader, instead of just a collection of words strung together to encourage advertising clicks.

Why Changes To Revenue Sharing Sites Are Good For All Of Us

As the new reality unfolds, there will be sites that emerge as winners and those who end up as losers. Hubpages is one of those sites that will clearly remain at the top of the game, due to a loyal community of writers and a solid plan by management to improve overall content of the site.

As a writer, I personally see this as a challenge and am looking forward to the future. To do my part, I am trying to improve the quality my writing, as well as correct older articles that need some changes. I personally want to take a little extra time, do more research and write an informative and detailed article such as "How To Take A Long Exposure Photograph Of The Moon", and avoid writing those such as "Where To Find A Cheap Lawyer". I also want to expand my mind as a person as I do the necessary research required to create interesting content, and hopefully expand my wallet as I attract readers who actually care what words I type.

As a web searcher, I appreciate more relevant searches as I do research for my articles.

In the end, only articles that offer a reader some real value, and not just draw them in to then follow an advertising link, will earn a writer anything at all.

What are your thoughts on the recent changes to sites that share Adsense revenue with writers? Do you feel this is a positive change, or do you feel upset at having to change the way you write income generating articles? Feel free to leave your comments below, as well as take the poll below this article.