How to Be Mr. X
Wow. All sorts of goodies are starting to dribble in.
Thanks to all of you anonymous tipsters out there for the news!
Got something you want to let us know about?
Why not drop us a line?
It don’t cost nothing!
Today’s tip comes from a contact known only as “X”.
That’s pretty cool that we’ve got John Doe reading the site now.
And, come to think of it….X was from Los Angeles…and Demand Studios is based in Santa Monica…..
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This is of interest to DS writers who are familiar with eHow’s Writer Compensation Program (defunct for about a year now), and especially of interest to any DS writers who are still getting monthly payments for their WCP articles.
Everyone always talks about the day when eHow will stop paying revenue share earnings to WCP members, delete all of the user-generated content, and/or offer to buy the articles out-right.
That day is coming pretty damn soon. If you haven’t saved a copy of your WCP articles, DO IT YESTERDAY. JUST DO IT, OK?
Many of eHow’s WCP members have already been contacted by corporate, but not before having to sign a non-disclosure agreement about eHow/Demand’s plans. Nothing prohibits me from telling anyone about the fact that I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. But I can’t tell you what the NDA says, or what confidential information I learned that necessitated an NDA.
Not to worry though! As usual, eHow’s programmers suck balls, and ANY WCP member can access the NDA from their new login url. In fact, eHow’s developers left such a glaring loop hole that any WCP member can even sign and sumbit the NDA! This could be intentional if they plan to contact everyone eventually. But more than likely, they just have braindead progammers. Perhaps the zombies got to noshing on their noggins.
If you want to see the NDA, just go to https://myarticles.ehow.com/SignIn.aspx. That’s the new login url to access your WCP earnings. Login with your WCP username and password. Once you are logged in, change the url to this:
https://myarticles.ehow.com/nda.aspx
Look very carefully at the page title in your browser’s tab. You can’t see this on the NDA page itself, but the title in browser tab says it all.
Yours Truly,
X
Right on, John Doe!
I read and re-read their offer to make sure than I did not have to hand delete my articles for the to be a decline of an offer. There was no such statement. Even so, I deleted all my big income ones, and tried to go back whenever I had time to delete more of them. I’ve been busy putting them on my blog and today when I did a google search before posting one of them, it was still on eHow, with my name removed as author. I don’t know for sure if this was one I deleted or not, but I DID NOT tell them they could keep it. I have emailed them at: support@ehow.zendesk.com
If their system can remove my name as author, then it could have removed the whole article. Who knows what other articles of mine are there? Guess I get busy finding out.
!!@@!!??@!!!
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Anybody who thought they declined Demand Media’s paltry offer should do a search on ehow for their articles. I have found a number of my articles still on their website, despite the fact that they should have been removed. This is much to my chagrin, as I had submitted the artciles elsewhere making me appear to be a liar and a plagiarizer. Believe me, this is completely unethical, and while I am sure it was a mix-up on their part, Demand Media are evil, but surely not that evil, this mistake should not have been made and has cost me my reputation.
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I am being offered almost $2,700 for 51 articles that have earned me over $5,000 in the last three years. I wrote them for eHow, not DS (never did WCP articles for them.)
I am not displeased, really.
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In some cases DMS is offering better deals on the second round of buyouts than on the first round back in March. Two people who got contacted personally in March were both offered about $40 and $45 per article for several hundred articles. Now in May I hear about offers ranging from $2 to $90 per article. Wow. Those upper range peeps must have been writing about DUI lawyers and mesothelioma.
The second rounders (that I know of) do not seem to have as many articles as the first rounders (that I know of). Maybe DMS wanted to pay the really big payouts first in March and then deal with smaller payouts later.
Then again, you never know if people could just be lying to make themselves look good.
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I’m intentionally being very anonymous, so no reason for me to lie. The articles I mentioned were almost all my own titles, written in 2007-2008
I’m not going to be specific about my topics, but they were really mundane and non-technical. A few of them had earned very well though; so if I was making $20-40 per month on them, imagine what DMS was making. Many of mine weren’t earning worth a shit though.
People were offered up to $90 per on average? Wow. DMS must have been raking it in on some of this drivel. And they still are, what a racket….
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I think this is true. I just tried to log in to see how I’m doing for May so far, and nothing is showing up. I earn at least $30-$40 a month (not a lot, I know, but I don’t have many articles), so it’s weird that May wouldn’t even be listed.
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Good old “braniac” strikes again, this time the brain is taking over articles written by certain top-earning eHow WCP users.
Read this thread and look at the second post made by the OP. He/She links to eHow articles written by more prolific users, but instead of having their usernames at the top, it’s “braniac.”
I did a little digging around; ALL of the articles written by 6 prominent eHow writers are now listed with braniac in the byline. I won’t out who these 6 are, but they are people who wrote ebooks on how to write for eHow. I’m sure these 6 are not the only ones.
This change is much bigger than when they removed everyone’s profile pages. I assume that eHow will eventually make everyone’s byline braniac in the near future. But as of now, my WCP articles still have my username at the top.
If they’re going to change the byline, could they at least spell “brainiac” right once and for all??? Geez.
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So…you don’t have a backup right now? Why would anyone not have a backup of their articles? As soon as if was written, you should have a backup before the glitch monster deletes the whole thing when you press publish lol.
Anyway, that NDA URL doesn’t load. Apparently you didn’t consider that they might have to authorize your logged in account to see that page so nobody else can.
If I remember correctly, they said in the original “yeah, I agree” thing when you sign up that they can discontinue the WCP at any time. So if they offer to buy out all your articles and you say no, they could just stop paying you so I wouldn’t try to hold out indefinitely.
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the whole post seems kind of fishy to me. i was reading on another forum about eHow members being contacted by Demand Media. i highly doubt that Mr.X was one of those contacted. i mean, he doens’t even say what the NDO says, i think he just heard about the link from someone else and is trying to stir up trouble here.
really, everyone must have backed up their articles when eHow first started doing sweeps, so this is just alarmist nonesense.
i think they are just doing a survey among members to get their reactions on some new change they’re about to do.
the WCP isn’t going away anytime soon. i know someone who did get contacted and he reassured me that it wasn’t about closing down the WCP.
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My guess is that they are going to switch to an Adsense revenue sharing model like HP, Bukisa, and the like, OR they are going to remove users’ abilities to go back and edit their articles as they can do now. I think our initialized friends are suggesting you download a copy of your articles now because if you don’t have an Adsense account, eHow will be of no use to you.
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i highly doubt this, they already do that basically but they only give about 40 percent of the adsense, if you stick your adsense code in i think they would have to pay all rev on certain ad blocks
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I just checked my account – no message on any page. All this does indeed make me curious, but nothing they do would surprise me at this point.
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someone please add details, i have not received a letter/call or anything. i know people may not say what exactly is going on but at least can you say if its a good thing or bad thing??
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If you haven’t received any kind of notification, it’s likely because you have fewer articles and were a member for a less than a year before the WCP closed, and likely you don’t make all that much off of your articles. If I’ve judged your situation correctly and you don’t have much at stake, I’d say it’s neither a good nor bad thing, so don’t worry.
This seems to be targeted at the older and more prolific users, who would have more interest in changes.
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I had about 80 articles, make over $200 a month, signed up for WCP in 2008, no notification yet, thanks though. I heard they were calling people, how are they getting the phone numbers? theres no place to add a number in myarticles.ehow
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I concur with X on making a backup copy of your articles, regardless of what may be going down. Everyone with a WCP account will find out eventually, but better to prepare now.
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“Page cannot be displayed.”
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Looks like the loophole has been closed.
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update: as of now, anyone who has a WCP account will see an urgent message at the top of their account screen. They want you to contact an eHow employee so they can get in touch with you about the secret plans. It *looks* like they are rolling it out to everyone with a WCP account. (this is based on my own sample.)
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