Clearly, HubPages is a business.
They want to encourage people to publish hubs that will attract clicks. Impressions are good but clicks bring in their monthly paychecks.
However, many people join HubPages just to write. If you visit HubPages you will see that there are many talented hubbers who write just for the fun of it. I am sure they wouldn’t mind earning a few extra Google AdSense bucks at the side, but they are mainly interested in self expression.
These hubbers are really good for the HubPages community because they are usually active participants. They create interesting and thought provoking hubs that enrich the HubPages environment and help to attract other high quality writers.
There are also many people who join HubPages just to make money. They are less interested in chatting, and more interested in generating clicks. They focus on writing about click topics such as products, travel, losing weight, skin care, and others that are known to have a high click through rate, and/or good advertisement value.
The difficulty of maintaining a place such as HubPages is keeping the right balance between the two groups. Too much commercialization, and the environment becomes sterile and boring, thereby driving many good writers away. On the other hand, thought provoking topics are usually not good click topics. Even those that bring in impressions, will rarely result in clicks.
And so it is a complex dance.
Some prominent hubbers have left recently because the balance of the dance was no longer right for them. The dance is every changing though, so I hope that one day, those talented hubbers will return.
For now, I will continue with the HubPages dance, because it is still a good dance for me …
July 12, 2009 at 9:35 am |
I myself find it very useful to create deep backlinks to my small space and apartment gardening website. Hubpages, also provides some revenue for the work done and creates branding.
Happy Hubpaging, Marty
October 5, 2009 at 11:49 am |
Interesting article but just one point that may or may not be valid about the act of embedding a video being the same as adding a picture or text.
In the latter cases one has to actually “copy” the content in order to be able to then add it to a website or blog so that is of course clear cut as a copyright infringement if permission is not requested.
However with an embedding technique the embed code is a means to just “show” the content (video) on the website and the actual content still resides on the source page so no actual copying is taking place.
Surely that is a key point to bear in mind and of course is open to interpretation but most would argue we think that the embedding option is not a copyright infringement ?