Business and Society Articles

Gaining Context I opened my account at Vocal around two years ago when I published my first article. It was a syndicated article from my golf blog, which surprisingly has done better than all other articles since. Around three months ago, I decided to give Vocal a real chance with a renewed effort and by becoming a Vocal Plus member. They enticed me with half off a year’s membership ($50 for a year, usually it is $99 annually or $10/month). Since this renewed effort, I have published nine articles; six were written originally at Vocal (four were for Vocal Challenges), and the other 3 were syndicated from elsewhere. The plan for Vocal was to publish my creative writing there originally, which meant I had to switch from HubPages where these were published originally before. The distracting ads and lackluster RPM helped make this decision, although I’ve been writing on HP for over a decade. After three months of “working” Vocal, I’ve realized it isn’t worth paying the $10/month. I’ll expl

Thinking back to 2014 I remember this exciting website that hit the scene called Bubblews. The theme was atrocious and the type of writing was mostly inane, yet the video game atmosphere and hopes of making cash drew many people into its playful bubble. It didn’t take me long to catch on to the most exciting money-making endeavor for online writers, although it did seem like I was late to the party considering how rapidly everyone moved up in social status with every view, star (like), and comment being compensated for payment through PayPal. Bubblews originally hit the scene in beta mode in 2012, which is why I probably felt a bit late coming to the scene in late 2014. They didn’t officially launch until July 16, 2014, according to Business Wire . The founders were 26-year-olds Arvind Dixit and Jason Zuccari who moved to San Francisco to launch the grand idea. To be fair, this was during an early time with internet adoption, only a couple of years after smartphones became ubiquitous

  What started in 2012 has become a reality in 2022, yet the reality isn’t quite what I had in mind. Writing is what started, originally for a website called  All Voices , which was a citizen journalist site working from a revenue-sharing model (is no longer around). This was very exciting to me at the time, an ambitious writer in his early 30s, a person who had been internet starved throughout his twenties and early thirties and now had access to the online world — the world was awaiting my opinions, so I hoped. The reality ten years later is what could be called a scrambled blogger or a scatterbrained writer, forlorn in the shadows of obscurity and lost in the wide efforts of his ambition. The whole “eggs in the basket” idea has turned into ashes in the woodstove, as little efforts spent far and wide equal little payoffs in the proverbial basket. It’s not even the stretched-too-thin problem that has rendered my efforts nearly penniless, it is the lost ambition to write and the loss o