Self-publishing content company Helium has raised another 10 million in debt financing according to a SEC filing from earlier today. Listed on the the filing are President Mark Renalli, and board members Ann Bushell and John Paloian from RR Donnelly, Joseph Farrelly of Interpublic Group, Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink, Steve Pogorzelski, David Weild IV and William Huff. There is no indication of who invested on the SEC form.
Sort of like a proto-content farm, Helium writers get paid to write “How to” guides on subjects ranging from “How to get physically ready for Marine Basic Training” to “How to change back to Yahoo! Mail Classic” (wow). → Read More
Last December, Saul Hansell left his job as a veteran reporter and blogger at the New York Times to become the programming director for Aol’s Seed, which is the new online assignment desk for Aol’s 80 different Websites. In his first blog post since he took on the new job, Hansell admits that his new career path was met by “a lot of blank stares” from friends and family. Seed is still a bit of a mystery to many, but its essentially a way for Aol to assign articles to anyone on the Web beyond the 3,500 journalists and professional freelancers it employs directly. Why is this important? As Hansell explains:
AOL is a very different company now. It is independent again. And its mission is to redefine journalism for the Internet age.
Seed is supposed to help by assigning the stories that “satisfy the world’s curiosity” (the Seed Creed). Hansell does his best to make writing articles for Aol at $30 to $300 a pop sound enticing: → Read More
Aol’s answer to Wikipedia is Owl, a new site described as “a living, breathing library where useful knowledge, opinions and images are posted from experts the world over.”
Owl seems more of a testbed for Seed than anything else. Seed, of course, is Aol’s new low-cost content management system for soliciting articles and photographs for its network of existing Websites. Owl will crowdsource freelance work from “experts” who submit articles about movies, books, health, sports, money, parenting, computers, and other topics.
An “expert” is anyone who gets approved through Seed. Contributers get paid a little bit and the articles tend to be more how-to advice such as “How To Survive A Long Flight”, “The Right Way To Pop a Zit,” and “Top 5 Ways To Score Free Food.” It’s all very search-engine friendly. → Read More
Remember Squidoo? Founded by current CEO and famous marketing guru Seth Godin, the service allows Internet users to generate rich, topical web pages (dubbed ‘lenses’) to serve as a hub for information, videos, links etc. centered around any given subject. The concept is similar to what companies like HubPages, Mahalo and Helium are all about.
Now Squidoo is looking to monetize the web service directly – rather then depend on on-site advertising – by persuading brands to pay for management of their respective lenses.
In a blog post, Godin shares more details about the new initiative – dubbed ‘Brands in Public’ – and explains why he believes brands will be willing to pay for it. → Read More
The bomb-shelter mentality among startups is now so severe that even companies raising money are announcing layoffs in response to diminished economic prospects. Boston-based Helium just closed a $17 million series A financing about ten days ago, and then cut 30 percent of the organization (18 people) last week. CEO Mark Ranalli tells me:
We expect a deterioration of overall ad rates, and a slowing of the economy in general. Our approach was to take a third of every group across engineering, customer service, and sales.
Ranalli has been raising the $17 million piecemeal over the past year from hedge funds, family trusts, and wealthy individuals. The last $2 million came in two weeks ago. Combined with the current cuts, Ranalli believes he has enough to make it to profitability. → Read More
The online writing community Helium recently ended its 100 day reward-a-thon, during which contributors were rewarded with small bonuses for each article they submitted. Helium serves as both a directory and marketplace for user generated articles. Writers can earn revenue based on the quality and popularity of each article they submit, though typical payouts tend to be quite small. The reward-a-thon augmented each writer’s pay by $1-3 per article, depending on the quality of the author. In the end, the site says that over 1,000 Helium members earned rewards during the period (only a couple dozen made over $600). The reward-a-thon was not without some controversy, however. The site employs a complex rating system for each writer, and those that weren’t ranked highly enough were knocked into a lower paybracket or out of the reward-a-thon altogether. An author’s “quality” is determined both by how well their articles are judged, and by how good they are at rating articles written by other contributors. Much of this system relies on the opinions of others, making it difficult for a contributor to maintain a high ranking. CrunchBase Information Helium Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Citizen journalism site Helium has today officially launched its content marketplace after 7 months in beta testing. We’ve covered the service twice before, once in 2006, then last year when Helium Marketplace first opened its doors. Helium offers two services: a user generated content portal that’s part Wikipedia, part Squidoo, complete with revenue sharing. The marketplace works in a similar way to oDesk, Scriptance and similar services, marrying buyers looking for articles to be written, with writers who can supply original content. Unlike similar marketplace services, individual writers are not selected for each job, instead submitting articles against job requests that can then be voted upon by other users. The publisher then selects the articles they want to use from the rank-ordered list. During its beta phase, Helium Marketplace signed up over 100,000 active freelance writers. Payments per article range from $20 to over $100, with a 20% transaction fee going to Helium. CrunchBase Information Helium Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Helium is a directory of user generated articles. Anyone can submit an article to any of 24 different categories (arts, autos, politics, etc.). Articles can be submitted directly to channels, entered into contests, or as part of a debate. Since Helium’s launch last October the site has gotten over 69,000 writers and accumulated over 400,000 articles on 60,000 topics. Over the past couple of months they’ve been running a pilot program for new “Marketplace” service that connects authors and publishers. Today, they’re officially launching the service. Using “Marketplace”, publishers can list bounties for articles they want written. Authors then submit their stories following the publisher’s writing guidelines and compete for the bounty. Publishers can select any of the articles as the winner, although Helium’s peer review ratings help rank the list. Payments per article range from $20 to over $100, with 20% transaction fee going to Helium. For the pilot they have 14 publishers listing about 10 bounties a piece. In September they expect to have over 1000 publishers on the system. → Read More
Massachusetts based Helium launched its user generated article database yesterday and combines original writing with user rankings and profit sharing. It’s an interesting model that’s more compelling that proved more compelling than I thought it would once I started using it. The site is fun to use. I should disclose that Helium is a sponsor for the upcoming TechCrunch New York Party, though to be honest I wasn’t going to write about them after the site was heavily criticized on Digg yesterday for the quality of the writing. After using it myself though I’ve decided that it’s got more potential than I thought it might. The group rating system in particular could take care of the fact that the site is currently dominated by short, unhelpful text obviously written by people for whom English is a second language. Quality content is already starting to rise to the top. It’s not expert vetted, for that you’ll have to go to the mainstream media or Citizendium, and it’s not collaboratively written like Wikipedia. It’s not crazy (in a nice way) like Squidoo. It is collaboratively edited in a unique and compelling way. Here’s how it works. Users are asked to write articles on topics from 25 categories and many subcategories, starting with nothing but a subject line. After writing one article, users are taken to a page to rank other articles in the topic area they just wrote about. Two articles written by other users but with user names removed are placed side by side and the reader is asked which is a better article. Any number of articles can be compared two at a time on a continuum (“article A is much better, or a little better than article B” for example). The best articles are then displayed on the category’s front page, followed by related articles in order of reader ranking. Users can check the status of their articles – mine on “The best providers for internet phone calls” is currently at #11 out of 21 on the topic. It’s not clear what the revenue split on ads surrounding an author’s content is, but you can monitor your earnings and request payment by PayPal when you hit $25. You can also subscribe to the top articles on any topic by RSS. Each author has a space to provide information about themselves, followed by a list of all the articles they → Read More
