Write for Us, But We Won’t Tell You How You’ll Get Paid

Another Catch-22 in the writing platform world.

If, after having your readership and earnings summarily eviscerated by Medium last year, you chose to look into Vocal or Newsbreak (I chose the latter), you too might have been seduced by the idea of making a grand a month in their initial invitation. So did fellow Medium peep Darryl Brooks. His informative article is this:

His article gives you a solid idea of what’s going on over there, which for me was much the same experience. However, I spent some time with my social media buddy who went over the new monetization rules, and like Darryl, I also went back to see how they had scored my copy. I also looked at the ratings and how they fared against the eyeballs and page views.

Here’s my take:

First: Nearly ALL the articles that got the MOST views and page visits got extremely low Content Value (CV ratings). Said CV ratings could have easily been plagiarized from Medium or any other website. While the ratings are based on perfectly reasonable challenges (is the content unique?) well, duh, there is nothing new here.

By the way, Darryl’s article lists the CV outline we all received. So to that, with a very loud nod to my fellow Black, Brown, veteran, aged and otherwise different writers, I ask the following:

Just who the hell is determining content value? Who is on that panel? How many Black, Brown, Asian, Aged, Veteran, Disabled, LGBTQ writers get to determine what qualifies as “valuable content?”

Because if the only folks making that determination is a bunch of White folks between 25–45, I call bullshit. You have no goddamned idea what makes “valuable content” for people I write for. So if I write a piece about how I did 120 pushups on my 68th birthday, here are my ratings:

333K+ Impressions

22K+ Page Views

4 CV Score

A four? Apparently many people didn’t agree. Which is why nobody can establish themselves as the final word on your material, an arbiter of taste or quality content if said content doesn’t happen to appeal to their (White, Middle class) esthetic. Just saying.

Older folks seeking inspiration gonna love that piece. Of course they are. Those are who I write for with this kind of material. Is it unique? Well, Sparky, you tell me. How many 68-yo women do YOU know who can do that? You see my point.

What constitutes unique?

Who’s asking?

For which audience?

Precisely.

So while I don’t doubt that the CV system was intended to be helpful, it’s not. Because there is nothing that tells you how they weigh said score, so if you receive a 2 or a 5, you have no idea how they got there, nor how to change your material to get a better score.

But WAIT. Why would you, if you note, more than a few of us did, that a high score doesn’t correlate with page views, which is one of the ways Newsbreak is paying you?

Go figure, folks.

Like Darryl, I copied and pasted lots of high-performing Medium articles. First I noticed that my original titles tanked. I spent untold time learning to write more click-baity titles- which I abhor to my bones- to get eyeballs. I got eyeballs, but the readers are different. They can also be foul, to which, happily, Newsbreak finally gave us control over the comments. That said, that doesn’t change the fact that Newsbreak is a very different platform, and those folks are far more responsive to outrageous headlines than my more sane, sober readers on Medium.

Newsbreak vets their writers, and while in some cases that might be a good idea, they have also denied writers whose work I admire a great deal, and did so without explanation as to why.

Kristi Keller noted a while back that not only were the commenters pretty ugly, but your stories could well go viral without warning. And without any kind of parallel to our Medium experiences, which isn’t all that surprising. However, my social media guy JC Spears pointed out that Newsbreak is, unlike Medium, utterly determined to ensure that you cannot build an email list, cannot in ANY way mention or link to material to what they consider to be a competitor (like your website, kindly) or do anything whatsoever to promote anything other than Newsbreak across all platforms.

Look. That’s fine if you’re not trying to build an online presence. As I like others begin to learn how to navigate Newsbreak, I am also learning a great deal about how such platforms work hard to direct and control what you write to THEIR standards, which are arbitrary, and which do not in any way allow you the freedom to build your own business, which is also dictatorial.

Again. It’s their platform, you wanna play on it, you play by their unpredictable rules.

Like Medium, Newsbreak wants you to link your shit on your social media outlets back to them and them alone. I won’t do that. I write on my website first, and that populates social media and draws eyeballs to my website. I am not in the business of building Medium or Newsbreak’s profitability at my expense, albeit that’s largely what we all did on Medium last year, and got financially dunned for it. Yet here we are. They are still a slightly better platform for a variety of reasons.

Still, caveat emptor. Know what you’re signing.