
After 12 years and endless fights with Google, HubPages finds a buyer - adventured
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/06/hubpages-sells-to-maven-giving-venture-investors-exit-after-12-years.html
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neya
I used to be an avid HubPages fan. At its peak, it was mildly useful, kind of
like instagram where you'd be able to discover new, useful
projects/places/things and what not. During its time, AdSense was the craze,
everybody wanted an account. Since AdSense was invite-only, application based,
(don't know if it still is), the main criteria was to have a website/weblog
with some useful content. A LOT of people, many even in my circle used
HubPages to get their AdSense accounts approved. The process was simple - Open
a hub, write a couple of useful articles, submit it along with your AdSense
application and BINGO. Approved (for most, not all).

Over time, slowly, HubPages started positioning themselves as a "get rich
quick" scheme. This was especially suitable for them because they would also
share your revenue from your AdSense account (60-40? I'm not sure). There were
a LOT of affiliate products out there claiming to help you get rich quick with
AdSense and HubPages. They allowed this nonsense to grow like a snowball. Now,
I also made some money with their platform. Not too much, maybe about $100-200
in 2 months. I did try to scale my earnings, but realized the real guys who
were getting rich were the ones who were teaching me (with courses, books) on
how to get rich.

Around 2008-2009-ish if I'm not wrong, HubPages became the hub of Spam. And
then Google hit everyone hard with their algorithmic changes. It hit everyone
really hard. Even some of my quality hubs disappeared over night. Ever since
then, I learnt two lessons:

1) Don't rely 100% on someone else's (free) platform to host your content. Use
your own or pay for it.

2) If someone teaches you how to get rich, you can be 100% sure he/she's
getting rich because of you.

I never looked back at HubPages since then. Today, I logged in and wiped out
all information about me. Just had a look around and seems like not much has
changed since I last left them.

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AznHisoka
I have never ever found any single HubPage useful at all.

Yes, small publishers struggle in Google. And some of them produce very useful
content that should be more visible. HubPages isnt one of them though.

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dazc
I have found over the years that it isn't difficult to get useful content to
surface on Google; the problem is that a lot of content isn't useful and is
merely an SEO play.

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conductr
> a lot of content isn't useful and is merely an SEO play

wikiHow.com is an example I always see ranked high in search results but the
content is 99% garbage. Given high number of "how to" searches the world sees,
I'm surprised Google keeps them so highly rated.

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dh-g
Google wasn't fighting HubPages, just spammy SEO.

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modi15
From the article:

> "Paul and I are aligned because we both agree that mom-and-pop or small
> publishers no longer have a sustainable business," Heckman said in an
> interview. "It's over."

This is the biggest reason Google needs to be reined in by splitting it apart.

~~~
Godel_unicode
You seem to have an encoded assumption that smaller mom-and-pop businesses are
desired by the market and are being crowded out. I don't think that's true, I
think the average consumer doesn't especially care about the size of the
corporation they're dealing with. In my experience (and yes, obviously there
are the Patagonia exceptions to this general statement), people care about
price, quality, convenience, and then ethics. In that order.

~~~
maxxxxx
Probably true as far consumer attitude goes. But in the long run it's
healthier to have many small players. I think the fact that Google, Facebook
and Apple are so dominant is already killing a lot of innovation.

~~~
fixermark
Why is it healthy to have many small players? Larger companies have the
resources to put experts on hard problems. They also have the vested incentive
(since they have more to lose if they fail) to handle things like security
correctly---I trust Facebook and Google to use security and authentication
best-practices much more than J. Random Startup, for example.

~~~
maxxxxx
Because big companies set the hurdle really high for new technology to
succeed. Either they buy the new company and kill the product or they can re-
implement the feature.

To me mobile devices are an example of this. PalmOS or FirefoxOS could maybe
have succeeded if Android and iOS weren't that overwhelming. Apple and Google
can control whatever they want to be on their devices and what they don't
like. Innovation is pretty much stopped.

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fixermark
As a former owner of several generations of Palm devices and a former Palm
developer, I must regrettably suggest that it wasn't Apple or Google's control
of their respective ecosystems that killed PalmOS. Palm hardware was
unreliable and plagued with battery breakdown problems.

