I’ve been on HubPages since 2007 and I can say up front that Hubpages has made me a lot of a money over the years – so no HubPages.com is NOT a scam. You may not ever get paid though – there are a number of things you need to have to make money on Hubpages.
You will need the following to make money from Hubpages
- an Adsense account
- the ability to write lots of content and preferably the knowledge on how to keyword analysis – ie the what you write about
Its preferable that you have affiliate accounts with Amazon.com and eBay.com because you can earn money from these affiliates.
Panda Update Affect on Hubpages
In 2011 Hubpages hit the headlines though – because the Google updated called Panda (aka Farmer) in February (and Panda II in early April 2011) decided that Hubpages was a “content farm” and it dropped like a stone from the rankings.
I’ve already posted about how the hubpages slap affected my own hubs. Whether HubPages can weather the storm of Google’s displeasure comes down to a couple of things:
- how well backed they are financially – they are losing more money to this than to any of the writers – and some of them are hurting. If you have content you care about on Hubpages I suggest you back it up offline somewhere ASAP;
- whether they can make enough changes to recover from the slap – Squidoo did when they suffered a similar fall from Google’s good graces in 2007 – but at the time of writing its unclear whether HubPages will manage to do the same.
Hubpage’s own Ad Program
HubPages has rolled out their own advertising program – this was probably being planned before the Panda update – but the accelerated roll-out after Panda – and allowed all users to sign up from mid-April. The progam pays per an impression rather than a click – this has the advantage of providing a fairly constant level of income compared to wide variation of CPC and CLR that Adsense offers.
The downside is that pay per impression programs needs traffic, a lot of traffic – the idea way to get that is to chase trends in the news or celebrities – neither of which have any interest to me – nor do they fit well with the previously consistent message from HubPages for writers to produce “ever green content”
Hubpages Scam or Sinking?
There are some pretty extreme characters in the HubPages forums and if you are inclined towards conspiracy theories you will find them in spades. I’m not though – so no, I don’t believe HubPages is a scam – but, at the moment, I am not convinced of its long-term future as part of my passive income plan either.
Watch this space!