Why the Hub Challenge Sucks

Anyone who’s writing on Hubpages and has any ambition to do well will have come across the various hub challenges like the 30 day hub challenge or the 60 day hub challenge or substitute any other arbitrary number of days. In case you don’t know what I mean, the point is to write a certain number of hubs (transl.: articles) within that number of days – usually as many hubs as days but not always. The worst I’ve seen is the 100 hubs in 30 days challenge.

Many people swear by these challenges and reiterate how encouraging they are to new hubbers (transl.: authors) to get lots of content published quickly. In fact, one could almost call it a craze of hub challenges – with new ones springing up on a weekly basis. Because of all this praise and glory that these hub challenges are getting, it’s about time someone pointed out some of the problems with this mass production of content for the sheer sake of quantity. As a natural born contrarian I feel it is my duty to take this task upon myself. I’m specifically talking about those challenges that involve writing a certain number of articles in a short space of time.

Nothing per se. But the problem with these challenges is that they are strictly quantitative. In other words they encourage you to write articles without regard to quality. The idea is to fill your quota of the day. Most people will force this and by doing so this will flood the hubpages website with junk. Yes, I know, some people write really good hubs even when trying to meet a quota, but we all know, the majority of information on the internet is useless and these challenges focus specifically on increasing that useless kind of information.

These challenges also increase the risk that search engines penalize hubpages because of spam. Don’t believe me? Well how do you know it hasn’t already happened and hubpages would be much higher ranked if there was more quality control? Real quality content is the most sought after commodity on the internet. That IS the internet by anyone’s standard and search engineers know this. They spend a great deal of expertise and effort on getting the quality content ranked up and the junk ranked down or even ignored entirely. The only reason why it doesn’t work 100% is because there is so much to dig through that it has to be done with software using secret algorithms and they are not fool proof. But, these algorithms are being adapted and improved even as I write this so junk that gets high ranking today, is destined to oblivion in the long run. If one website produces a large amount of useless content because it’s authors are writing articles only to meet their quota of the day, then search engines WILL pick up on this.Guaranteed!

Ask yourself this. As a web surfer, when you search for information about a topic, does Google usually show you what you want? The answer is pretty much always “yes”. So do you think now that you can fool them with a two-paragraph article written in poor English and no research or experience on the topic into ranking it among the top 10 of pages on that topic? Actually, you might manage to fool them but my point is that you won’t make it last. It is only a matter of time before it gets ranked down. So you’ll have wasted your time, other people’s time and added to the noise on the internet – everybody looses.

Getting an article to earn money from Adsense or any of the other advertising platforms used by Hubpages is somewhat of an art. It requires many different things to work. Quality content is surely the most important but there is a lot more to it. Some topics will never earn you enough to make writing a single article on them worth while. Yes, I know they say you should write about what interests you. That has some truth to it but if your interest is something like home-made crayons then don’t bother opening an Adsense account.

The truth is most articles on Hubpages earn so little that the authors wouldn’t have written them if they’d known that beforehand. When you write your 100 hubs in 30 days, probably only about five of them will be lucrative, another twenty or thirty will make you pennies and the rest will be for nothing. I know, some experts out there will disagree but I’m talking to everybody here, not just the experts.

So writing many articles just for the sake of quantity is the best way to waste a lot of time and ultimately get you frustrated and discouraged. Believe me, it doesn’t feel nice to write a bunch of articles that get zero page views in a month. Much better it feels to write one article that people will read (So what? I like Yodian grammar.).

For the sake of completeness, I will tell you the other side of the story. Often, getting a good amount of content published is the biggest hurdle for newcomers. Without it, you can’t have experience to know what works and what doesn’t. This way you can tell what kind of articles and topics are best to write on and how to go about it. Of course, this can be achieved without forcing a certain number of hubs per day so it’s not such a good argument but nonetheless I have to mention it.

Many people need a quota to fill in order to be productive. If you’re such a person then you might benefit from a hub challenge. This is strictly for motivation. My advice is to look at the points I made earlier and find other ways to motivate yourself.

We need to get away from the “number of hubs is all that matters” requirement of these hub challenges so how about a challenge to write X number of words per day instead? I know it’s still quantity based but at least you’re free to write long articles and delve deeply into one topic over a number of days. That way, you can still produce a super article that could be an authority on a specific topic.

See also:

My Adsense Earnings on Hubpages

Hubpages Ads Disabled