Hub Pages, Giving Squidoo A Run For Their Money?

I just ran across Hub Pages the other day.

Hub Pages is a Squidoo like site, where you can create web pages about pretty much any topic, and earn a share of the advertising and affiliate revenue generated by the page.

The tools seem comparable, and make creating your page and embedding photos and videos quite easy. What distinguishes Hub Pages from Squidoo is the transparency of the accounting.

At Squidoo, all revenue goes to Squidoo and at the end of the month you learn how much each of your lenses earned. What goes into the calculation is a bit mysterious, but it’s definitely related to your lens’ traffic and page rank, and lots of other things.

At Hub Pages, you enter your Adsense id, your Amazon ID, your Ebay ID, and your Google Analytics tracking ID into your profile area. 60% of the page impressions generated by your page use your IDs. So you get tracking of those impressions through the various affiliate programs, and any income is paid to you directly by those programs. Hub Pages never sees your money.

I’m a big fan of Squidoo, but the transparency in Hub Pages is incredibly attractive. Being able to log into my Adsense account and see how many impressions and clicks I’ve gotten through my pages is very nice. Earnings should also tend to be higher, on average, with the 60/40 split.

Another great feature of Hub Pages is that you can create a link to one of the pages created by someone else, and when you drive traffic to that link you also earn a percentage of the ad impressions generated by that page for a while. So you can get impressions just by driving traffic to other people’s pages! This alone fosters a sense of community assistance. When other people can get paid to drive traffic to your pages, you won’t be the only one promoting them.

I haven’t yet created a hub over at Hub Pages, but will do so soon. I’ll add Hub Pages to my monthly income reports, along with Squidoo and Yuwie.

Click here for the Hub Pages tour.

Squidoo and Yuwie Earnings Update

It’s that time of the month when both Squidoo and Yuwie show the earnings for December.

Earnings at Yuwie were $3.77 down from $4.36 the in November. The main reason for the decline is that my own personal usage of Yuwie plummeted during December. I had a four week break between semesters, and spent very little of it on the computer. The computer time I did get was spent writing posts for this blog. The amount earned per 1,000 page views also dropped 3 cents, which contributed to the overall drop.

Earnings at Squidoo were $13.43, up from $8.93 in the previous period. My two highest rated lenses earned $6.23 each, and the rest of the amount is from the remaining lenses. The amount earned per lens has increased steadily for months, nearly doubling for the highest rated lenses. And this with my lens maintenance being at about the same level as my Yuwie activity, so all my lenses dropped in the rankings considerably.

It’s interesting to compare the two sites.

Squidoo is a way to write web pages that are then monetized in various ways, and you share in the earnings. Yuwie is a social networking site that shares ad revenue with you.

Squidoo can clearly outperform Yuwie in terms of earnings. Each of my two highest rated lenses at Squidoo earned more than I did in the entire month at Yuwie. And Yuwie earnings depend on getting referrals, while Squidoo earnings depend only on your ability to write quality lenses.

The other site of that argument is that literally anyone can generate page views at Yuwie. After all, it’s just web surfing and socializing. If you can point and click, you can earn something at Yuwie. Squidoo, on the other hand, requires you to write quality content. Junk gets rated low, and makes nothing. Out of nearly 30 lenses I’ve written, only two earn more than a few cents each month.

Both are opportunities to make money online free. Which is right for you?