1. They may have millions of visitors. Great for them. What they neglect to tell the writers is that the vast majority of those millions will never visit your specific articles. Many go to the homepage. Others use the site for other reasons. They visit articles written by other writers. You can often monetize your own site much better within a few months.

2. You don't have any control over the ad placement to improve conversions. Again, you're better with your own site where you can diversify income streams and optimize your site to improve conversions if you want to make money through ad revenue.

3. If they're so confident in their ad revenue potential, they can keep it and pay you a fair market rate out of pocket, expecting to profit through the ad revenue over time.

4. Relying on 3rd party ad revenue means you also rely on 3rd party marketing. Your content is useless without visitors, and if the site isn't going to heavily promote YOUR content to get those visitors and drive ad revenue, that falls on you too. Yep. You're expected to market their site too without any direct pay.

5. Some of these sites try to suck writers in by saying they'll earn ad revenue indefinitely or that it will continue to grow over time. That's utter BS. It happens like that early on. But eventually the ad revenue drops unless you continually create new (relatively unpaid) content. Old articles drop in search rankings and lose traffic. They end up in an oversaturated pool of content on the site as opposed to when the program just began. And many articles eventually become outdated.

Bad deal for the writer. Great deal for the cheapskate site owners.

I hope all writers steer clear from this ridiculous business model!!

Paula, that's insane! If that happened to me, I'd be gone. In fact, I did have that happen once, only it was much weirder. The client owed me $2,500 roundabouts. After leaning on him for three months, he finally called. The reason wasn't to apologize or tell me the money was on the way, but to offer me a place in his affiliate program. I was given the "opportunity" to sell HIS products and get minimal profit. Fine, but the kicker – he was offering me a REDUCED buy-in rate! Huh? I had to pay to sell his stupid products! When he said I could get in for $500, which he claimed was much lower than the $2,000 rate, I said no, hung up, and sent my last invoice to him with litigation notice attached. He paid and never darkened my doorstep again.

Sass! LOL That's it, Wendy. 🙂

You're brave to try it, Anne. Let me know how it goes, but I'm not confident it's anything more than a waste.

Wordvixen, if you're in control of it, it works. If you're being dictated the terms by a stranger, it works for THEM. As you pointed out, there are places that change their minds as much as they like and it always spells less for the writers.

Given that these places almost always believe that all traffic is equal, and don't understand strategic ad placement, earnings are usually abysmal. Remember Today.com? "We'll pay you $2 per post… I mean, $1 per post… I mean, $0.01 for every 5 page views… I mean, hey, we sold our domain to the Today show, sorry!"

I got the same offer from technocrati and if I take it it will go under marketing for me… and I'll do it for that reason alone… if I made an extra cash nickle I'd be surprised… and it might be worth it for page views.

But probably better to do a guest post here 😉