There's a website called Helium. It lets you post articles, and there's Google Ads, or some such. As the author, you get a percentage of the clickthrough.
The articles are organised by topic, and each topic is divided into titles. Top rated articles appear at the top of the list, and will get more clicks. The rating is done by other contributors, and this is how.
When you submit an article, it asks you to judge two other articles. You click to say which one you liked the best, and by how much. The article you pick gets a positive score, the other article gets a negative score. Once you've judged an article, it gives you two more.
Self-evidently, the average article has a score of 0. This means that new articles go in the middle of the list when you first post them.
It seems to let you judge as many as you like. I judged twenty or thirty pairs before I got bored. Unfortunately, because I posted in the Religion section, I got article after article of Christians sharing their joy. If only they were more selfish with it. It seems that Jesus dislikes all forms of literary affectation, but is quite relaxed about spelling and punctuation. Faced with a lack of criteria for differentiating the drivel, I voted for brevity, and penalised people for using all capitals, or not enough paragraphs.
Into the section headed Good without God: Secular humanism and morality, I submitted this piece, customised from a previous post here, and as you might expect it went in at number 4, out of a total of 7.
Imagine my surprise though when I went back today and it had risen to number 1. More importantly, since I submitted it on Tuesday it's made me 7 whole cents.
And to think I was beginning to worry that writing would never make me any money.
28/03/07 @ 19:58