Pitifully low offer

[cjgarrett]

$15 for unique rights for an 800 word article? I'll be damned if I'll sell my work for so little. It's almost insulting.

What would be the average amount per word that people sell the various rights for? What's the lowest offer you've ever taken, and the lowest you've refused immediately?

How do people feel about really low offers?

[jadedragon]

I'd like to get more offers but that one sounds too low.

[juliaamos]

I just received a $3.00 offer for an article listed for $20.00 for usage. Depressing...

[Judith]

I'm fairly new here, but have been a writer for longer than most of you have been alive. I never check the offer box. If you have placed a value on your work, you should accept nothing less. If you keep accepting less than you believe it is worth, soon you will believe it is worth only what is offered. That's not a good place to be.

[CharlotteAndrews]

I got two of those $3 offers today, too. You can tell when customers are carpet bombing authors with low offers everywhere. I'm new and every email that says I have a sale or offer is still really exciting. It's discouraging to log in and see how little it's for. Oh, well. It also serves as a reminder that all I can do is create new articles. That's the part I have control over. So . . . back to work for me.

[Lysis]

Even if you haven't made money on an article, you'll make more if you upload it to AC or even Helium. And, at least you own it and make residuals. I just received those offers. I no longer check the option for best offer. I still have old ones available, so I still get them. At an offer of $3, you can get that as an upfront from Associated Content and keep rights to the article.

[Lisa-Anne Sanderson]

I keep getting these low offers too. I always refuse them. They're usually from the same customer - I don't know why he keeps doing it!
This one was even lower than usual. It's very annoying.

I don't know if I can write for AC because I'm an OS writer. I will look into it today.

[jadedragon]

You can't really write and get paid by Associated Content as a non-US writer though if you can get paid residuals IF you are picked as a feature writer. At any rate I'm against supporting an organization that scammed all the non-US writers. They cut off the revenue share program without paying out the accumulated earnings and left no way to collect.

If you want revenue share by the view than use Bukisa. It pays well over 2X what AC pays andBukisa welcomes writers from everywhere. They are Israel based I think. If you want to sell full rights to articles, Constant Content is the best by far!

You should be able to earn far more than $3 per article on Bukisa or darn near any revenue sharing site over time so there is no reason to sell to someone for that cheap just so they can use it to earn on. Value your work and time higher than that.

[Lisa-Anne Sanderson]

Thank you, Jade Dragon. I received a few more offers from the same person today. It's very depressing! I think that the very low offers were for
good articles too.

I haven't tried Bukasa yet. I have been writing for Suite 101 but I haven't been pleased with my earnings there.

[Peejay]

I've had offers of $5 and $6 for full rights on articles. Needless to say those kind offers were declined. Three of those offers were from the same person.

I too had considered AC but was amazed to see they don't want non-US writers. Fair enough, I'll go elsewhere. I've also got a bit of experience with Helium. I made decent money once upon a time but earnings have collapsed in the last two or three years. The rules around rating stars are designed to stop you actually earning any money in my opinion. You have to be really active on the site to keep earning and the pennies that it pays makes it not worth your while.

I've not heard of Bukisa, but I'll take a look now.

[JRae]

Hello fellow authors!

My name's JRae. I'm new to this forum, but wanted to see what was being said about pitifully low offers. I've received several (many from the same source) that were obscene and insulting...like $3 to $5 for full rights to articles 500 to 1,000 words! I've watched this enough to conclude the person doing this is making offers on almost every article in one's list - no matter what the subject matter may be - while purposefully bidding ridiculously outrageous amounts for some weird, sick, twisted humor and/or form of playing childish tricks. (Surely there's no one out there who has the time to be doing this while supporting a web site. And surely there's no one who has any kind of decent site who'd be wiling to take any article on any subject if they can get it for less than chicken feed! That's beyond "cheap." It's theft!) Is there a way Constant Content can monitor these bids to obstruct this person (or these people) from using the site? Thanks for any answers. JRae

[michaelsmoker]

We've already had official comment on this in another thread, JRae. To CC, a customer who buys 100 articles for $3 each is just as valuable as one who buys 10 articles for $30 each. CC is not going to ban a customer for lowballing in their offers.

If you find those lowball offers annoying, just uncheck the Best Offer box from now on. I have yet to receive such a lowball offer and am not going to worry about it until I do.

One potential use for a lowball offer is if an article is obsolete but trapped on CC's system by the rules. There is a fellow writer who wrote a timely article on a 2007 episode of Dancing With the Stars. That article was purchased for single-use rights, so she can't take it offline even though no one will ever buy rights to it again. If she got an offer from the lowball artist I'm sure she'd be thrilled to make _some_ money off it.

Michael

[jadedragon]

Excellent point - write evergreen content. This is not a newspaper. You can delete an unsold article from the system anytime you want. Oddly once it sells for use it is stuck forever without intervention from site management.

[jak]

I have been able to update articles that have already sold for usage. Support archived the old versions for me on request, althouh they come up as sold on my article listing and I needed to invent a way to remember what had happened to them. I expect they would do that to remove any articles that are embarrassing anyone.

[michaelsmoker]

I'll suggest to the fellow writer that she email Eric asking for her 2007 DwtS article to be deleted.

A related question: I have an article that says "Thanksgiving" in the title and first paragraph and want to change that to "Christmas." Would I have to delete and resubmit or would CC be willing to do the edit for me?

Michael