Talk:HubPages

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a7 Notability and Importance

I see there's some past, but let's look at the present situation:

HubPages is mentioned by relevant Internet sources to an extent that makes it notable -Mashables -TechCrunch -Quantcast

HubPages gets a lot of traffic (over 6,000,000 unique views/month)

Hubpages is the first site to integrate Google AdSense API to share revenue with writers

HubPages has a lot of content -with nearly 100,000 individual hubs. -and an average of 67 visitors/hub/month.

HubPages is at least as notable as Squidoo -Relatively equal traffic -Much higher traffic on a per hub basis mroconnell (talk) 01:07, 9 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hubpages was selected as one of two case studies for Google's AdSense API (the other site was Blogger) http://code.google.com/apis/adsense/hubpages.html mroconnell (talk) 02:23, 9 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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Updated the Google Adsense link since the previous link was bad.

In spite of my criticism below that I think hubpages is a scam (which has nothing to do with notability), I would agree that HubPages is solidly notably. Here's a Washington Post article about it: [1]. Here's another article: [2]. Cazort (talk) 15:29, 5 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hubpages as a scam

Normally I'm wary of people who post messages like this on talk pages; I would like to call skeptics to check my contribution list to see that I'm a long-standing and active editor, and am coming here to voice a legitimate concern rather than blindly badmouth a company or website. I once signed up for hubpages and used it briefly. When I came to understand its policies and practices fully, I became fully convinced it was a scam. This web search: [3] seems to convince me that others have raised this issue before. The rationale is:

Hubpages removes the nofollow attribute of links in the articles by applying it retroactively to all pages authored by an author whose "score" drops below a certain point.
Authors' scores drop over time if they do not continually stay active on the site.
Hub scores drop over time if their traffic does not stay consistently high
The score is calculated in such a way that authors are competing against each other. For example, if one author creates a new hub similar to an existing hub, it can make the original hub's score drop.

Basically, it seems an abuse of the nofollow attribute as a punitive measure, using fear of loss of something of value (an active link, as it has SEO value) to motivate the author to keep contributing (unpaid) content, from which the company is profiting. By making a scarce resource (hub score) in high demand and inducing competition, hubpages is effectively exploiting human psychology to get authors to do something they would not do (write unpaid articles when a significant portion of them are getting nothing in exchange). This competitive aspect of the site, and the practice of slopping nofollow links on hubs is seriously downplayed in both the documentation and signup process. It's not mentioned in their FAQ and searching for "nofollow" in the help box turns up an empty search!

Besides the massive number of hits in that web search though, I haven't found any reliable source that would be usable to cite this (at least according to my pretty strict interpretation of WP:RS). I don't think a blog post (there are tons of those) or entry on another self-publishing article directory (again ton of those) is good enough. Does anyone have any sources establishing this? Or, anyone who writes for a reputable site with editorial integrity that would like to take this one on and write a reliable source to this effect? Cazort (talk) 23:25, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not a scam

I am an engineer at HubPages (my info at hubpages.com/profile/larryfreeman). I think that the person above is being unfair. I think that outside of SEO folks, most people don't care so much about "follow"/"nofollow". Also, I think that everyone knows the HubPages policy so it's not a surprise. A scam, in my view, is a trick. At HubPages, I believe that we are very clear about our policies (consider how many people in the example below mention the terms of service). Authors retain 100% of the copyright so they are free to move their content to another site if they are unhappy at HubPages.

Please consider this question that was asked on HubPages today. The asker is not an employee at HubPages and none of the responders are employees: hubpages.com/question/96158/what-do-you-like-most-about-hubpages

[Note: I am not able to link to the page directly since HubPages links are not allowed even in talk articles.]

Larryfreeman (talk) 00:35, 6 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]