For Flit: Why Are So Many Torqued at Today.com

flit asked: why are so many people so perturbed with today.com?

Why indeed. You might want to sit down for this.

Today.com is a blogging site that touts itself as a place where you can be paid to blog. I'm going to tell you my side of my story and then you are welcome to add your own bits or more questions or whatever. Many of us are putting stories on a blog called today.com exiles.

Let me start by saying: don't quit your day job. My sister was a member there and I pointed it out to flit and then flit convinced me to join (and, if I can figure out how to put flit into the conversation one more time, I can link her fourth blog). Anyway, I started out at the brilliant pay of $1/blog (up to one a day), minimum 150 words. Well, I wasn't in it for the money, which is a good thing. If you write a post that takes any effort, any time at all, you're drastically underpaid. But it's better than nothing. We are also paid for our traffic at what was described as $2/1000 hits. Every month they pay you and review your posts for "quality" and popularity wherein you can be bumped to a lower (or, in theory, higher) pay grade. You can't have ads because they are running ads on your blog.

Seemed fine to me. I was out in the blogoverse and, truly, I was enjoying myself. There were a number of high caliber today.com blogs, and a diverse world of other worthy blogs out there as well that I had never known. I started to have fun. Wasn't getting paid, really, but I was enjoying myself.

Then they started to change things. First, they made us all use the same template, presumably for their own comfort. Not that the template was terrible or couldn't be worked with, but many were disturbed by the uniform look of today.com and the loss of individuality. Then came the pressure to hawk products in our blogs and they'd give back a portion of the kickback on that (how much? Who knows? I don't. I refused to do so. If I'm going to take to writing advertisements, I'll damn sure be paid better than $1/post).

Still, even those that were disappointed mostly trudged on. After all, today.com was paying us. Then some people started noticing posts missing, money missing, discrepancies between the actual traffic and the traffic being paid for, etc. Unbeknown to most of us, they'd query on a private today.com forum and then be quietly kicked out, often without any prior notice.

Grumbling brought out belligerence from powers that be (and whiny stories about hardship from the leader of today.com) that we could suck it up or leave. Then Entrecard's new policy meant today.com was kicking us off EC. With many of us having limited methods to garner traffic, it was a blow. Then we were told we could keep it but would be given nothing for EC traffic. Then we found out that much of the traffic was paid at a different (and lower rate) than we'd been told. New blogs were no longer being paid per post but were just paid for traffic (using their calculations and their foggy and undefined but lower than advertised rates).

Well, I was losing interest in today.com, though I was still getting paid when a friend of mine let me know she'd been locked out for writing a blog that said she was sad to be losing EC. She was sent an email - your account is closed. Bye. If she hadn't been logged in at that time, she would have lost everything. She was able to clean things up and leave a "find me here note" - though they deleted it next day.

Well, that decided me to make my transition. I moved this blog, Ask Me Anything, but I wasn't changing anything yet, just getting set up. I moved my old EC widget here. A blog pal noticed I was being duplicated and let me know I was being ripped off, so I put up my, "I'm moving my blog here" post for "Ask Me Anything".

Bam, within hours I was locked out. Well, OK, I took my award-winning (Today.com's editor's choice for December!) Rocket Scientist label and moved it to a new blog I built on the fly. Then I notified my pals where to find me. I was irked but not livid. I wasn't moving the material in Rocket Science - just the label and myself, though I liked to think of myself as a boon. For some reason, they unlocked it the next day, so I took out my custom banners and all of my family photos from there. But I wasn't posting any more.

Then I heard about a few more like my friend that had been kicked. Flit and I discussed amongst ourselves. What with the drastic rate cutting and the constant hounding to build traffic and hawk stuff (and, folks, exactly how many people travel to blog to read advertisements - sheesh - that's kinda counterintuitive, isn't it?), we didn't think they'd be around long. Sure enough, on payday, dozens if not most of the today.com bloggers were no longer being paid per post, just on traffic. And being pressured to buy today.com ads (I did before I left - couldn't change it to my new site and 300 views/0 clicks last I saw. I won't be recommending it). Complain on a forum or your own blog - you were locked out with an email like this.

Can I just pause a moment to express my disgust with an organization so STUPID as to take bloggers (many of them exceptionally good) and toss them out in the world for speaking out in private. What did they think, they'd go "Damn, without ANY OUTLET in the entire world to express myself, I'll never be able to complain about today.com again." Folks, this is the internet. You'll be getting way more ugliness than if you'd been honest or respectful or polite or patient. The idiocy of their current policy blows my mind.

Many of the exiles started to get together and compare stories and the stories weren't pretty. You can find links to a number of them here. Today.com started getting all sanctimonious about the enforced exodus and harsh to any and all dissenters (even if the dissension was somewhere other than today.com). Then Today.com announced (in their private forum) that they were not only keeping the content of anyone who left (and NOT paying anyone who left a "find me here" blog - which they would erase - or saying anything derogatory in the private forums), but they'd give the established blog to someone else.

AS IF! Good luck finding another rocket scientist at the jolly sum of $5/month for traffic only.

So, if you find a fresh blog out there where they writer is just a wee bit angsty, don't be surprised if they're a today.com exile.

Oh, and today.com? If you were thinking of starting a blog there, seriously, think again.