Days Gone By

It was over a decade ago that the Internet teemed with online writing sites.   Everyone seemed to get the fact  that having a pile of articles which would grab the public was a great way to earn money.

Think of it;  pop on Adsense, (and other ads)  have the writing done by people who will receive a fraction of the ‘take’.  

A site, full of Ads posted on someone’s writing, getting free money for the owners and his band of ‘Mods’.

Wasn’t much work;  a plagiarism checker would race over the articles, tossing those it deemed plagiarised in one corner.   Run one of those programs which turns up obscenities and hate speech, and throws those articles in another corner.

List the writers as expert, good, average, and poor, and toss the poor in the back, the expert in the front.

In those days any site that didn’t pay or ripped off the writers became prime topic on other sites and soon disappeared.

Those who ran  sites knew this so did try to be honest

Then, Google’s Panda came on, which down voted every paying writing site so that they would not appear in a Google.  This was done because the Evil Google wanted to introduce its own site, but a non-paying writing site.  

Google felt if it killed the paying sites everyone would flock it’s ‘Knol’.

What Google did was destroy good sites, its own went down the toilet, and it cleared the field for dishonest scammers to take the field.