Any feedback on suite101.com?

[mvd]

It's a freelance writing site where you can earn money. Anyone have experience with it or recommend/not recommend it?

[Bucky]

1. I used to work for them. I think they've changed their system since then.

I worked for them back before (and tragically during) the Dot Com bust. I wrote articles on a particular topic and kept an updated list of links on that topic and they paid me $35 per month. Not bad. Then the bust happened and they quit paying, but it was a fun, lively community and they promised they were looking for a way to return to a revenue stream for their writers. They never had a real revenue model for the three years I was with them (two years being paid, then another year waiting to see if they would return to paying for the content).

They kept monkeying with the system, trying to avoid the rather obvious step of selling ad space at the top of the page and along a column. At first the site was pleasing to eye. Most of their design "improvements" looked like crap--changing to an icky green color, adding a 4th column (which screwed with the layouts of existing articles that used graphics), and even a bizarre attempt at reorganizing the site organization along lines of the Dewey Decimal system. It was a slow, ugly train wreck compared to the fun community site it was for a long while. Of course with all the monkeying around, they gutted their web traffic rates.

For a while in the late 90s they were well positioned to compete with About.com, which did the same sort of thing with a good deal less personality (About.com doesn't have discussion boards which each editor was supposed to maintain). But the inexplicable choice to not seek paying ad revenue was their death knell. They did Google ads last time I peeked in on them, but I don't think that would be enough to actually turn a profit.

I don't know if they ever quite got their act together. When I left them in 2002 they still didn't have a working business model. It was a cute idea gone awry. If they're willing to actually pay, rather than say give you a forum for posting your writing with a so called "opportunity to earn money" later down the line, I'd advise taking a look. My guess is that they're probably still not quite up to actually paying.

[mvd]

2. Thanks - it says they pay now here

http://www.suite101.com/freelance_writing_jobs /

But from what you said, I'm not sure it's worth applying.