I must admit I am a little…no wait…I am GREATLY disappointed in the way eHow.com seems to be running their business. Back in December when I first started writing for them I had high hopes for being able to add them to my list of successful passive income streams and as of right now it still is, but they seem to be on a spiral downward and I’m not so sure there is a way back up for them. The latest UK fiasco seems to be pushing eHow writers towards leaving eHow and pursuing other article directories. So what exactly happened? Well, it would seem that eHow decided to clone eHow writer’s articles and make a UK version. So what’s the big deal? Writers can’t be paid for earnings through the Google Ad program that appear for the UK site! That means the writers aren’t being paid for the use of our articles. And to top it off, in many cases, the UK website articles are ranking higher than the regular US website version of the article. Writers are complaining of HUGE decreases in their revenue because of this. Just recently the community manager “Rich” posted a message on the forum telling writers that their articles will be removed from the UK site within a few weeks.

Come on now. I am a programmer and I can tell you that I am 99.9% sure that in their database they have each article on the UK site marked as either one of theirs or one of ours. It shouldn’t take weeks to bring those articles down. Assuming they have a programmer worth half a dollar working for them, he should be able to go straight into that database and deactivate all articles that don’t belong to them by writing a couple of lines of SQL. That’s complete hogwash eHow!

The end of the month is coming close which means I will be preparing my earnings for the month of January and even I am surprised I didn’t see much of an increase over last month. I haven’t yet decided if I will continue to write for eHow and am seriously considering removing my articles completely. Something to mull over through the weekend. What do you think about all of this?