Qassia Change of Terms

• As of February 8, 2009, we are only accepting previously unpublished, original material content. Material that appeared previously on your website, third-party content, or anything else previously published on the web is no longer being accepted. We have taken this measure to expediate the screening process.

  Please DO NOT mark material that is already on the web as "Unpublished Original" to get around the restriction, as this will result in the immediate termination of your account.

  Our apologies and thank you for your understanding.

• We have been banning an average of a dozen users a day since February 8 for posting regurgitated material. We ONLY accept virgin material now, and you WILL be banned for life WITHOUT QUESTION and WITHOUT WARNING if you post something that has previously appeared elsewhere on the web and label it as "Unpublished Original" content.

The above is a recent message posted on Qassia. So it seems they now only accept original content. I don't know why that should be as before one could post either original or copied content, so long as one held the copyright. I suspect people were abusing the system. Although both types of article would earn the same in revenue sharing terms they did earn different amounts of Qassia Dollars. These QD did not turn into real money but are a way to reward the most active users and the best voted content. So if people were posting as original material stuff that wasn't then they would potentially earn more QDs and hence gain more exposure. This is just my feeling about this.

However, this now changes the viability of posting at Qassia. On the positive side it is a worthwhile attempt to have original content, but I must say that given my paltry earnings at Qassia - even with a very highly rated piece - I personally am reluctant to spend the time writing original material. However, different topics seem to do well on different sites. One important thing is that:

You may publish content with us that you intend to republish elsewhere later on. Please wait until the intel has been screened and published on Qassia prior to re-publishing it on another website.

It often takes 2 or 3 days to get an article screened, so it means waiting for that length of time then being able to post it on other websites, including your own. The screening process on Qassia means that 12 people have to review and vote on an article before it is officially published and starts earning revenue. No adverts are shown on the article page while it is being screened. On the one hand this is a good way to self-monitor the site content and avoid spam and complete junk. On the other hand I'm sure it affects earnings.

Another website that demands original content is suite101. In their case each article is monitored by a team of paid editors and, after a trial period, the default setting is that articles are published immediately - and start earning immediately. Suite101 pays 50% of advertising earnings compared to Qassia's 100% of revenue on advertising on your article pages. As always, you'll need to experiment and make a choice.