Recently, I made the personal decision to stop writing for Suite101. It was part of a larger decision that I made to stop chasing the residual carrot, so to speak. If I want to earn passive income, I’d rather take a more stable approach like writing a book or selling my art prints. I only speak for myself when I say this but there is a lot that led me to this decision. I wanted to share some things about Suite101 that I do not think are talked about very often and some things that people may find controversial. In no way am I attempting to say that Suite101 is not a good company. They are a solid, stable web company with a highly responsive support team and an excellent revenue model. However, there were some deal breakers for me and these are as follows.
- Suite101 has an overzealous, almost cult-like crowd that hangs out in the forums a lot. No one can question anything about the company without being viciously attacked in the forums. Even innocent questions are sometimes grounds for ganging up on someone. Some people even make a special attempt to send hate mail to you just because they don’t like something you said. Its a good reason to stay the heck out of the forums.
- While most editors at Suite are helpful and friendly, there are some that use chat-speak and make silly requests. I had a request that was almost DS-like, which was frightening. That type of thing should not be allowed at a site that boasts “quality” and only hires a small handful of editors compared to most large content websites. Obviously some editors need to be reevaluated, but one can argue that online editors, unfortunately aren’t always the most diligent bunch.
- Revenues continue to plummet. At 29 articles, I don’t even make payout each month. At 15, I started making payout each month until about four months ago when it declined day after day. Although, I seriously doubt this is Suite101’s fault. Adsense is down everywhere. Then again, its not really fair that writers only collect adsense revenue. There are several other advertising programs (infolinks being one of them) that pay far better than adsense. Again, some consider this a non-issue but those are the people with 1000s of articles and tons of spare time. Obviously, I am not one of them.
- You’ll never get your content back. Once its up, its up forever and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. This doesn’t bother me as much as the other issues but it can be problematic for writers who always write their best and/or have articles in specialized subjects in which they would like to sell or place elsewhere.
- They say write “evergreen” articles so you can keep earning but if you stop writing, your revenue dwindles — sometimes your revenue will even be halved. This is what happened to me when I took a three month break due to the extremely low revenues and my depressed state of mind because of my lack of funds.
Despite these issues, I would still recommend Suite101 for certain people. For some people, the positives far outweigh the negatives. I’d recommend it for new writers or people with full-time jobs seeking side income. I’d also recommend it for writers who specialize in a particular subject such as natural health or personal finance since Suite is very friendly to specialists. However, if you are a general, academic, technical, or copy writer I would personally do some serious thinking about joining. You aren’t likely to earn very much from your efforts and a lot will be expected of you for very little return.