Does anyone still write for eHow?

Ehow was one of the best places to make money online for years, but does anyone still write for eHow now? Sure they had a secret algorithm and no one really know how they were being paid, but the earnings were considerably higher than most other sites. Ehow has a great Alexa rating and is one of the most trafficked sites on the web. This fact, combined with the nature of writing "how to" articles that were found by inquisitive people seeking to solve problems led to a very high click through rate for Google Adsense and thus really nice earnings for the writers. It was my first revenue sharing site when I delved into the realm of internet article marketing and I made some OK money and enjoyed my time there. Then came Demand Studios.

Demand Studios came in with a hatchet and chopped the whole system of publishing articles. Writers no longer could publish SEO oriented articles quickly and efficiently like they used to. To be honest I don't really blame Demand Studios for what they did, they have to preserve the quality of their site to maintain page rankings. A system like Hubpages would have been much better in my opinion, but now eHow authors are given a list of pre-selected topics to choose from and are paid a flat fee of roughly 15 dollars. I was one of the "lucky" writers there to be pre-approved to continue writing for eHow.

There is absolutely no reason to write in a search engine optimized manner, because you are no longer sharing revenue on most titles. Some titles are still available that offer revenue share, usually with horrible keywords, and there is also a way to submit the topics you wish to write about for approval. This system is incredibly frustrating because everything goes to editors who are actually "good" at there job as much as I hate to say. Your articles must be pristine and match their exact formula verbatim or they are denied over an over.

• You can only select a few topics at a time and once you complete and submit them if you make a mistake on the format it comes back to you for a rewrite.
• Rewrites disappear very quickly if you do not re work them and re submit them.
• My BIO was denied 3 times before it was approved because I did not explicitly state how long I had been writing in the exact format, I did not describe my education in the correct order, my "fun fact" about myself did not pertain to eHow's exact standard of what a "fun fact" should be.
• Some of the editors critique your work like an absolute Nazi, cold, raw and even with a nasty attitude when they respond. It wouldn't surprise me if they all have thick German accents and go around asking writers for there papers.
• Most of the topics really suck. It is not even an opinion of mine it is the truth. I had an article topic I claimed to write for them called "How to Backdate the Job Seekers Allowance". I did about an hour of research on the topic, considering that I am American and Job Seekers allowance is a UK government program, and I wrote an article that explained exactly how and when it was possible to backdate the "JSA" as its called and it was denied for a rewrite because it "didn't begin with an actionable step". There was no actionable step for this topic - there was only specific cases when one was eligible to do this or not. Someone in the UK looking for information on this topic would have fully understood all of the situations in which they were eligible for backdated payments from my article and that meant absolutely nothing.

• It will actually make you a good writer. If you still want to write for eHow, some of the editors are very nice and offer insightful critiques. Getting an article through this gauntlet means the article is truly vetted.
• This system uniforms the sites content and ensures that the site will be more useful to readers.
• Ehow use to do article sweeps all the time and your articles were always in jeopardy of being deleted, even your top earners. Apparently they realized they can just check the new content coming in instead of trying to sift through massive amounts of articles with terrible grammar that are SEO sniped for particular keywords.

I am going to give eHow an honest shot under this new system, if nothing else to improve my writing and become more versatile at keeping my writing within a specific format. I plan to write 3 articles a day for eHow, 2 of the articles will be the $15 dollar upfront articles, the last one will be one of the revenue sharing titles. After my experiment I will create a hub where anyone who is interested can track my progress and see if it is really still possible for the average person to make some decent money from eHow.

Does anyone still write for eHow? I would love to hear your trials and tribulations with Demand Studios to see if anyone is having success with the new system. Feedback from any of you who still write for eHow will be much appreciated!