by Dragos, on January 24th, 2009
How does AssociatedContent.com succeed to pay you, where do they take the money from? As you have noticed on your live article page, there are advertising banners in and near your article. That is how they make money. And if you look closer, you will see that they are using AdSense to deliver relevant ads with your articles.
If you didn't know AdSense(+AdWords) is an advertising network from Google, the most popular one at the moment. So AssociatedContent.com shows ads from Google on pages containing your articles and they are able to make money from that, and from the money they make they are able to pay you. Now the tricky part in this thing is that they will make a lot more from those ads than they will pay you. According to AC for 1000 views of your articles you will receive $1.50. Usually Google will pay you approximatively $0.2 per click on their ads and if we take the click through rate of 3%, we'll obtain 1000*3%*0.2=$6 (I've taken the worst cases, because there are cases when a click may be valued at even $3, so $0.2 is the worst case for an article directory website). So AC will make $6 and pay you only $1.5, that's 4 times lower. That is just an example, but i am sure they are making much more than i estimated.
A solution? A solution would be to find an article directory which allows you to have you own ads displayed on your own article pages. It's much more credible to get paid by a settled company like Google than by AssociatedContent.You will have the chance to earn much more than with AC, trust me.
Another thing i don't like on AC is how they call article writers, they call them content producers. In my opinion it's too roughly said, article writers are not slaves or something else.
Note: I do not try to blame AssociatedContent for how their payment system works, because for someone it may work better for others worse. It is my own point of view I've made after a small analysis.
A good article directory offering the possibility to earn money directly via the Google AdSense program is MintArticles.com. There are some testimonials on the Internet about people who made $2 with just some tens of page views(not thousands). Not so much, but it's better.
3 Responses to “AssociatedContent.com scam? Doesn’t pay?”
Many of these sites dont pay.
There must be a way to warn them
Heated questions here, without much actual research done to answer them. I have been paid more than $30,000 over the past three years from AC. Yes, some people can make more with their own URLs if they know how to market them. For the average person who wants to write, AC is a great part-time money maker. Just to update you, they call people who submit content to the site contributors now. They make it a broad term because AC is not just text, it’s also video, photos and audio. Personally, I have made a lot more on AC than on my blogs and websites. To each his or her own, but next time do not make assumptions about if people are getting paid or not. I have been paid three to five times PER WEEK for upfronts and monthly for pageviews. I have always been paid by AC. It’s not a scam. Thanks!
Actually, AC is a premium adsense publisher. Which means, they get to choose their Google ads and can set up a contract with Google about their payment. So, they do definitely get paid much more than .2 dollars. We have no idea, but premium publishers do take in a huge profit. So, it’s easy to say that AC pays one fiftieth of what it earns to authors. Yes, it’s a rip-off.
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