Originally Posted by ilnjscb

They announced it this morning - affiliates didn't make that much money there anyway. Still, they sold advertising based on pageviews ..... apparently paying pennies for content to generate traffic still doesn't make you that profitable.

Originally Posted by kane

I used to write regularly for them. I would do episode reviews/recaps of shows like Dexter and The Walking Dead. At that time if you knew what you were doing and got your review up at the right time you could land near the top of the first page on Google News for people searching for things like Walking Dead Recap etc. I would get tens of thousands of views a day and was making some pretty good money. Then Google kicked them in the teeth and suddenly it became nearly impossible to get good placements on Google News. The same articles that were generating 30,000+ views were suddenly generating 300 views. Not to mention it became very difficult to get the editors to accept your article for Google news. I stopped writing for them because it wasn't worth working for a couple of hours on something only to make 20 cents from it.

You could tell they were in trouble because they did a full redesign of the site and plastered it with ads including some pretty annoying pop-ups so I think their traffic tanked and then they annoyed the shit out of those who were still coming to the site.