Writing Articles - Making Money

eHow recently responded to its members regarding their use of member articles for a six month period to build their UK website.  They are now calling this website the "beta" site.  I imagine there are legal implications if they do not admit that there was testing going on.  But, I am no lawyer.  For anyone who does not have speakers or who just wants to read what the reply was I have transcribed it.  I draw different meanings from things after I hear them a few times and especially once I read them. 

What do you think of eHow finally absolutely admitting that the earnings drop was indeed caused by the UK website?  Does this close the door on the issue?

The following is a transcript of eHow's video blog response about the UK site and earnings issues:


Hi eHow community. This is Rich the eHow community manager. I know many of you had some questions about the eHow UK website. I thought the best person who can answer this question is our general manager here whose name is Greg..um..beforehand, I kinda want to get some tidbit um surrounding your history with eHow.



Greg: sure yeah. I know you’re in the community every day and you’re really the voice for our community and I have been working for eHow for four years now. I was actually the first full time hire by our parent company Demand Media purchased eHow back in 2006 and it’s been fantastic to watch the journey. Um. We’ve really grown into a site where we have millions of readers coming every month and a lot of that is because of our community and the articles that they’ve written and contributed…so uh, I’d be happy to answer questions.


R - Great. Um so like one of the main questions I keep seeing on the forums is uh why did we uh release this uh UK beta website?



G - uh yeah no that’s great question. We really followed the same tradition that we followed that we release every product here uh at eHow. We’re trying to build the best user experience. We want to get feedback on new products uh that’s why we launched the test beta site. We’re doing the same thing on mobile right now. We just released the new android application and we’re really getting feedback from our mobile users and we just launched another project which is eHow logic tool [not sure right name 1:12] and that’s more of an application so it really came down to us to uh thinking about hey we’re a big website in the US and we want to expand internationally and uh our friends over in the UK are a great place because they’re reading English articles and we started with that and uh we got a lot of feedback.



R - Great. Um It’s good to hear um another like second question I hear a lot is and I think is like the one I hear the most is



G - Sure



R - did the um UK um website, this beta website that we have, did it somehow impact the user earnings ?



G - Yeah uh that’s a great question. I know there’s been a lot of chatter about that and yes the uh the our beta UK website did actually impact the earnings and we value our community a lot and we’re going to go ahead and compensate our users for that so I know they’ve been quite vocal about that and um I saw a couple of posts that you responded to you know at the time we launched the beta UK site we didn’t have the ability to automatically pay our members every month like we do in the US um but we’ve gone back and we’ve generously estimated uh those earnings and we’ll be paying out those earnings uh with January’s payment early February.



R - sweet I think that they would uh that’s some good news. I’m pretty sure that they’ll be happy about that um so this is our like first video and it’s you know just something



G - yeah



R - a good opportunity if you have anything else to tell the community



G - yeah no I love it. I think this is a great format to talk with our users and reaching out and uh I hope we do more of these. Um it’s really been just fantastic over the um past four years watching our little website turn into quite a big website. A lot of that is because of our community and really the passion that our members have and uh to be there every day and to be involved in the dialogue and to be creating articles and information that millions of people are searching for and helping them complete their every day projects so um we’re going to continue to fulfill that mission and uh we really look forward to our community to be a huge part of that.



R - sweet. You know I really think definitely has a great format for us to like get the community to get some insight into what’s going on at eHow and I think we should probably do more of these video blogs and I’m looking forward to doing more of these and telling the community about what’s going on at eHow and uh just want to say to the community as well that uh Julie and I we’re always available on the forums um if you have any questions we’re there to answer those questions for you um if you want to write or message us and ask us like any questions about the site or it you know any future like product releases or you know just get some sort of like insight into what’s going on the site you’re more that welcome you know to message us um but uh thanks for tuning in and we hope that when we post up our next video blog that you’ll tune in as well. Thanks.

eHow UK Site Impacted Earnings - Redirects Articles Home

eHow has taken action to move forward.  They redirected the UK articles to the US articles supposedly as of January 21.  While I think it is interesting an entire day went by without the action being reported, I am glad something has finally changed.  I do still have some suspicions that are actually fueled in part by the way eHow has fixed the situation.  As much as I wish I knew programming, I don't.  I do find it interesting that they could remedy the UK situation by simply redirecting our articles.  To me, this means that the intent with the UK site was clearly one of gathering views and making free money.  eHow made a lot of money in the past half year by diverting viewers to their free mirror site.  They clearly did NOT pay or compensate us in any way for any action over the past five or six months while using articles and lying about the real impact of the UK site.


If the solution to this UK situation is simply redirecting the UK articles back to the US articles then eHow absolutely had full awareness that the UK site set up unfair and direct competition.  For members who supported eHow through this entire UK site charade, I just wonder if they realize what eHow UK did to members, them included. The multi-million dollar company built by community members made a mirror website with our content, without our permission, likely violating intellectual property laws, and then has the audacity to make a statement about community.  I wonder what an intellectual properties lawyer or online copyright law attorney thinks about this blatant misuse of content.  One thing is certain. Online content writers need to learn about copyright law, including how to report plagiarism when bloggers and scrapers use content without permission.  The internet should not be a place without morality.  I am going to read up on copyright law and suggest go to the library, search online, or read some books about copyright law and licensing.  

Rich Says eHow Did Not Deceive Members - Can't We All Just Get Along

I am not a lawyer. I want to know what rights, if any, were actually violated in the process of them using my eHow articles on a cloned UK site then covering it up and not paying members for it.  Rich, eHow's Community Manager commented:

"Look, everyone will have their own thoughts.  However, I think few folks are really caught up in the fact that we intentionally tried to "deceive" our members, and that's not true.  And, I'm being honest about this. I just need to butt in when I read such things because that was definitely not our intention.  Our commitment is to our community and it's a team effort to tie up any loose ends that may have been over looked.  You can't change things if everyone keeps having that mentality of "you vs me."  If you want eHow to be the best site possible and a site that you can be proud of, then we need to work together, collaboratively, to make that happen.  -Rich"

If the eHow community is going to move forward from this UK fiasco, eHow is going to have to make some kind of concession that they made a mistake. Although I suspect they legally cannot do that without admitting some sort of fault that can land them in hotter water. The community is asking for compensation*.  Some people are talking about lawsuits.  eHow "solved" the problem with a simple redirect of our articles. When Google crawls the site again it will read all the new code further directing it away from the UK site.

What then was the purpose of the UK site.  Where do we go from here?  If they can direct the UK back to the US then didn't they have to first direct the readers to the UK?

(update:  eHow admits fault and compensates writers, sort of)