Boycott Hubpages

my hubpages account

In my opinion censorship is something belonging to Nazi-like regimes and doesn’t deserve a place on Internet which was developed and meant to be a free platform. If companies, organizations etc. want to censor without any possibility of dispute they should be banned from what they didn’t help to develop. I don’t mind Internet to be commercialized when it is a way for people to make money and support themselves from behind their pc in their own home, but it hurts my feelings when I have to experience that an initiative that was developed to bring the world together has become an ordinary advertisement platform.

Hubpages is not the only one and the issue is not new. Internet has become a main street of an ancient town, destroyed by the big brands, their banners and campaigns. What disturbs me personally is the way they present themselves.

According to the amount of “Hubbers” today it works, at least for their “levelers”, the chosen ones who have written so much that Hubpages itself is growing fat thanks to the ad-clicks they generate. That is not what bothers me. When I signed up for Hubpages I wanted to see if it is true that you can make some money by writing for them. Forget it! After about 20 articles and 1000 visitors I made exactly 62 cents through them. I earn by writing, but not thanks to Hubpages. Visitors need to click on the ads to gain, but even when they do don't count on revenues. I investigated it myself from a different IP-address: clicking the ads, filling out surveys, and guess what: Not one penny! I know this already for a couple of months and this is not the reason for my boycott-call. I like to write, ventilate my opinion, and Hubpages has a broad audience. A lot of people believe the fairy-tale to earn by writing, and some do, I’m certain. The ones who make the big bucks for the company will be paid. Of course: you don’t take the risk kicking out the gold-shitting donkey by not rewarding him. Hubpages gains thanks to the fact that the majority of their users don’t have a clue how Internet works. They just write their articles from behind their sophisticated type-writers and load what they have to say up to the greedy Moloch, Hubpages is.

Hubpages is not the only platform where I publish, and I reach a broader audience and get better paid on for example my own blog-site, but Hubpages gave me the opportunity to get in touch with a complete different gamma of readers. What you find over there is the average travel article and cookery recopies you will find in every free magazine. Not much to go for because Hubpages doesn’t like opinions, which are personal and can be threatening.

The first time they unpublished one of my Hubs was when they found out that what I uploaded to their pages was not exclusively for them. I was writing a sequel about Internet and its affect on our future which I started as a blog. Hubpages was an opportunity to reach a broader audience, and therefore I uploaded the same story to my Hubpages account. After chapter six one of their censors woke up and unpublished chapter seven. I received an email to inform me that Hubs should be exclusive, and they asked me to correct this. In other words: take your blog offline or fuck off! Pardon? An organization which doesn’t pay for your efforts but instead gains from it, demands writing exclusively for them? Who do they think they are? I wrote a Hub about hubbing, stipulating the fact that the authors’ right was still mine. What could be the reason knowing that my content was original? The answer didn’t come from Hubpages themselves, in fact they never respond, but from one of the “levelers”. By duplicating, even if content is original, it would affect Hubpages’ Google ranking, was her honest meant opinion. I never heard greater nonsense, but as I said: Hubpages-users don’t have a clue. You can tell them anything. They will believe it.

At first I wanted to quit immediately: Fuck off, exclusively for them and gaining 62 cents over 20 articles! I re-thought this because I had an audience there. Not big, but lets see what happens if I write hubs for a hubbing public and play the game by their rules. Just curious; always after getting more knowledge about how Internet and its different facets work. So I started a series about places I lived.

The next email arrived yesterday. This time they didn’t accuse me of duplicated content because I published the articles exclusively on Hubpages. It was even worse: “Violation: Not English – Primarily written or recorded in a language other than English”; it said. Absolute rubbish! Since the time one of my teachers in high school accused me of plait because he couldn’t believe that I wrote so well, I never experienced such an allegation. Every article was original written by me, only published on Hubpages and not translated nor used in any other kind or language. Why the email then? I don’t know. As I explained before: being unpublished on Hubpages is without any dispute. They don’t defend or explain their decision. One has to except after a company reaches the power. For the second time I wrote a hub about hubbing to see if hubbers would react. Hubpages didn’t like my wording I suppose; accusing them of Nazi-practices. They unpublished that one as well: this time with the excuse that the hub was personal and therefore a blog.

It is time to stop this kind of companies which become a plague on a platform which began as a free enterprise to combine the knowledge of mankind worldwide. If this is all Internet has to offer then we better plug out all servers in order to get our social lives back in stead of being hoarest in what we do best.