Beware of Joining NewBreak— The New Model Will Send You to the Poorhouse

Except for a handful of writers, they have gotten rid of base pay for the rest of promising good earnings through page views alone, then dropped RPM so low that you would need millions of views per article to earn even a small amount of income.

I have been fairly vocal about the different turn of events that have occurred with Newsbreak over the past year. While I want to say upfront that I am grateful for the money I earned while with them, I think their lack of transparency and communication with their writers is not the way to run a business.

I do understand that the platform was possibly looking for a small number of journalistic writers who they would be willing to continue paying. However, they should have given us some more information upfront, instead of stringing us along, then suddenly cutting us off with no more than 2–3 days warning.

The changes that occurred on NewsBreak from month to month were pretty astounding. At first you could publish pretty much anything, including personal essays, fiction, poetry, recipes etc. Then they cut everything but news related stories. Then they cut everything but local news stories which could be told about anywhere in the U.S. Then they went to hyper-local stories with the same parameters. Then they suddenly announced that you could only publish hyper-local stories about your personal location and anyone who had done otherwise would have their base pay cut and possibly be banned from the program.

Of course, by that time, for those of us who had published stories about other places, even those we traveled to, came from, grew up in or simply visited regularly, it was too late. They didn’t announce this ahead of time but announced they’d be reviewing everyone’s accounts and would cut anyone who had written about multiple locations. Although I didn’t have my base pay cut the first month after they announced this, and although that month I published nothing but hyper local content about Chicago, the second month because I had stories written about Atlanta and other places that I’d lived on issues I was well versed in, and the articles were extremely well researched with links to all original sources, on July 29th I was informed I would no longer receive base pay from there on out.

I appealed and received no response. I asked for an explanation of why I was cut and after two weeks and several other emails sent, received the same form reply that was the original email just saying my base pay had been cut.

Finally, giving up along with hundreds of other writers who were equally clueless about what the problem was, I moved on and focused on the rest of the program. They said that there would be exciting new revenue opportunities and the chance to earn from just page views would provide a more accurate picture of our articles’ performance. Up front, this already looked a little shady since I was perfectly capable of seeing what my page views were as listed on my dashboard.

They also did something maddening. After pushing exclusively for hyper local content and cutting anyone who wrote anything from outside their own neighborhood or city, they suddenly announced that starting the beginning of August creators could write “evergreen” stories which are the exact opposite of breaking news, content about anywhere in the world we chose, although this got the majority of writers cut from the program, many of us just days earlier, and if we were experts on something we could share topical articles about that area. Articles in this last category wouldn’t even be news stories. They added other things that were non-news related including recipes! At the end there was a comment about how if we chose to create local content that was fine too.

They had once again completely changed their model and the insulting thing was that they were asking for the very types of stories they used to cut the base pay of so many writers. Still, I thought I’d stick it out for another month.

The first week of August I noticed that their distribution of my articles was down. There was also an announcement about a “three strikes program,” where after one warning about breaking a “content rule”, the second offense would get you suspended for a week and after the third warning you would be banned from the program for life.

Included in the content policy was the admonition against re-reporting stories that were already on the internet. At this point, I almost hung it up. While I don’t just re-report or summarize individual stories and instead integrate and synthesize different stories to present things in a unique way, the stories are obviously all able to be researched so they are on the internet. This rule suggested that they would only accept articles that were from journalistic reporting and which no one else had reported.

Towards the end of the first week of August, I also noticed my RPM dropping. In the program, it was 12, and after being cut from base pay, it had been almost 11. At this point, it dropped to 8 and by the end of the second week had dropped to 2. As of the last day of August it was at .1. So, while still on base pay, I earned $12 per thousand views, I now earn 10 cents for every 1000 views. To earn $100, will now require 1 million views! And as the RPM has been dropping drastically by the day, I imagine it will continue to go lower.

The offensive thing is that NB still gets the same amount based on the ads they place on our stories. The lower they drop our RPM, the greater the amount they keep which is earned from ad revenue generated from our articles.

If that weren’t bad enough, I looked back through the hundreds of articles I wrote while still receiving base pay. In addition to base pay and earnings for page views from recent content, I also had earned several hundred dollars a month from views on older articles as the contracts that they were written under guaranteed an RPM of 12. Yet, despite the fact that each article should have continued to be governed by the contract it was written under, I found that NB had changed all of the RPM for previous articles to fall in line with what they were now offering.

The same problems that writers have been complaining about since the beginning continue to exist. In particular, the lack of communication informing us of what is coming up as well as refusal to answer emails that are calling something into question.

The biggest problem with NewsBreak is that they don’t appear to have thought anything through ahead of time and it feels like they are flying by the seat of their pants. They change the model and contracts every month or two, don’t abide by the contracts but expect you to do so, and change what they are looking for.

I wrote one last article yesterday. However, after doing the math, and then realizing that exercise was futile since we have no idea how low our RPM will drop and are therefore unable to calculate how many articles we’d need to average a month to earn a goal amount, I decided to cut my losses. At this point, it doesn’t make sense to simply give them my writing for practically free and let them earn off of my hard work.

If you are considering joining the platform, I would recommend thinking twice. If you weren’t in on the base pay period, they will make you wait for at least 3 months before allowing you to monetize your content, then an extra month while they review your application, all the while earning off of what you write. After that you will be lucky to make pennies per article, while they take the rest of whatever your writing earns.

Be smart with your time. Be fair to yourself. Don’t let others under value your skills. Though it’s been said numerous times before: Writing for pennies isn’t experience, it’s abuse. If someone wants to pay you to write, you obviously already have the experience to do what they want.

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