Dear Contributors,
You made the past nine years incredible. At Yahoo, we're focused on making daily habits more inspiring and entertaining. That means we're constantly reviewing our products and experiences and, in some cases, we have to make tough decisions to no longer support a product. As part of our ongoing effort to sharpen our focus, on July 31, 2014, Voices.Yahoo.com will be shut down; on August 15, we will make the final Performance Payment before Contributor.Yahoo.com closes. With the exception of content you provided to Yahoo under a work for hire license, or unless Yahoo arranges differently with you, we will remove from Yahoo all content published through Yahoo Contributor Network and rights for all of your Yahoo Contributor Network content will revert to you.
We know you have a lot of questions. Please refer to this FAQ for details.
It has been such an incredible privilege to share your talents with the world over these past nine years. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.
-The Yahoo Contributor Network Team
That was the crux of the email I got on Wednesday from The Yahoo Contributor Network. The subject of the email read "Thank You." I'd already heard about the shutting down of Yahoo Voices from an old writer friend of mine, Abby Greenhill, who'd passed the news on to me via Facebook. She, like many other of my writing friends, had stopped writing for the website when Yahoo first took over the old Associated Content in 2010. I stuck with it, though my contributions to the site whittled down quite a bit because their conditions for publishing became a little stricter.
The news still comes as a little bit of a shock to me and has left me a little lost, too. You see, this summer I had been planning on doing a lot of writing and Yahoo Voices was the place for me. Just two days before this announcement I had quit my titles at Examiner and will no longer publish for them. So now I've got nothing left but John's World, which is okay, but leaves me with no income from writing.
So yeah, I'm a little sad, and a little angry, too. Just another case of a big corporation gobbling up smaller businesses only to take them away. Gotta love capitalism! Even though Associated Content wasn't the first site I'd ever written for, it was the one where I wrote the most, and had the most success. In fact, the month of May 2014 had been my most successful month ever, with over 80K hits to my work.
I first started writing for AC back in the winter of 2007/08, right after I had split up with my ex. I'd done a few pieces here and there on innocuous things like recipes for zucchini bake and meatballs, a review of Michael Moore's Sicko, and random thoughts on Christmas and God. Then in late December of that year, I started to open up about mine and Joe's breakup and ended up doing a whole series called Reflections of a Breakup. That series, which ended up being quite a few articles and put me on the map as a bona fide writer for the site. I've written 611 articles and garnered over 770K page views in the six-plus years I've written for them. Now there's bubkus!
At the moment I'm not sure how to proceed. I've got a book in the works, so maybe I'll just work on that, along with more posts on John's World. I've had a couple of offers to write with other sites, but I really have to think on them before I make any decisions. In the meantime, I've got to make sure that I've got all of my pieces saved because it all goes away come mid-August. So sad! Stay tuned for more on this....
The news still comes as a little bit of a shock to me and has left me a little lost, too. You see, this summer I had been planning on doing a lot of writing and Yahoo Voices was the place for me. Just two days before this announcement I had quit my titles at Examiner and will no longer publish for them. So now I've got nothing left but John's World, which is okay, but leaves me with no income from writing.
So yeah, I'm a little sad, and a little angry, too. Just another case of a big corporation gobbling up smaller businesses only to take them away. Gotta love capitalism! Even though Associated Content wasn't the first site I'd ever written for, it was the one where I wrote the most, and had the most success. In fact, the month of May 2014 had been my most successful month ever, with over 80K hits to my work.
I first started writing for AC back in the winter of 2007/08, right after I had split up with my ex. I'd done a few pieces here and there on innocuous things like recipes for zucchini bake and meatballs, a review of Michael Moore's Sicko, and random thoughts on Christmas and God. Then in late December of that year, I started to open up about mine and Joe's breakup and ended up doing a whole series called Reflections of a Breakup. That series, which ended up being quite a few articles and put me on the map as a bona fide writer for the site. I've written 611 articles and garnered over 770K page views in the six-plus years I've written for them. Now there's bubkus!
At the moment I'm not sure how to proceed. I've got a book in the works, so maybe I'll just work on that, along with more posts on John's World. I've had a couple of offers to write with other sites, but I really have to think on them before I make any decisions. In the meantime, I've got to make sure that I've got all of my pieces saved because it all goes away come mid-August. So sad! Stay tuned for more on this....
That's very sad. I sure hope you don't lose any of your work :-(
ReplyDeleteI hope you find a new place that you feel comfortable writing...so many of us will miss your stories.