December 2nd, 2011 - (Los Angeles, California) - With writers having plenty of outlets to vent their stories these days, several sites have emerged that pride themselves on offering a unique publishing experience.
First, setting the standard, was Associated Content which was later purchased by Yahoo!. What was special about Associated Content was that they had a professional publishing interface and allowed you to make money, nearly immediately, by publishing your written works or even videos. Then AC got a bad rap by the search engines for letting people publish semi-useless content that offered poor quality search results for users. When you start paying people for useless content, and the word spreads, the problem only got worse until, now, you hardly see any Associated Content (now known as http://voices.yahoo.com/) in the search results any more. Further, they no longer allow uninvited authors to write for them.
After the success and acquisition of Associated Content, "Article" sites started popping up. These sites had a "silent" agreement with writers: You publish your content with back links to your site and we'll make money off of the Google AdSense that we have running on your ads. This led to sites like ArticlesBase and other clones to launch and, again, product more sub-standard written works.
Google then thwarted the appearance of sub-standard written works with their "Panda" search engine algorithm adjustment which filtered out low-quality content. Since then, "article" sites have seen a steep decline in the viability of their model as well as some innocent sites getting caught in the cross-fire however they eventually recovered after the initial adjustment.
There are some sites that have managed to publish high-quality pieces while still being a great option for writers. Sites like http://qondio.com and http://citynext.com offer writers a path to get their works published and read by users.
