How Themestream 
Swindled Me Out Of 
My Writing Revenue
Copyright © 2001 by Maria Stefanova 

Maria is the owner of LG Software, a company which aims to make SAT, GRE and GMAT preparation more easy, funny and effective, of course!  She is a graduate of the American University in Bulgaria, class 2000. She has majored in Computer Science and Business Administration. Her experience in working with customers, managing small teams and software projects has been extensive.

OK, I'll admit it; I hate people taking advantage of me. Not that they do not do it, just the more I'm aware of it, the more angry I get. So, today my enemy is Themestream. Right, it's exactly that Themestream--the one that will publish your articles and pay you $0.02 per unique view. However, as of today they have changed their rules: they will pay per unique view of a registered user, only! 

So, you may ask, why am I so angry? They are paying, right? Nope, they are not. I have published my articles with them, and out of pure curiosity I let some of them stay for three days on their site to see how many of the faithful Themestream subscribers will be interested in reading them. As you probably know, Themestream publishes the most recent articles on the top of the page. So guess how many visits these articles had? 

The maximum number was EIGHT! 

Themestream had brought only eight readers to my articles. Eight?

So, I published the links to these articles on my website and I made no effort to promote them.

This particular article that had only received eight visits for three days now has TWO HUNDRED UNIQUE visitors every single day. These are people that visit Themestream, watch the advertising banners that Themestream gets paid for because they are interested in MY article and because they WANT to read my article!

Now, I bring real people to Themestream, real people that watch the banners, click on the banners and probably purchase stuff because of these banners. So, Themestream exists because I provide good quality articles and because I bring in people who want to read these articles. They do not even make an effort to help me promote my articles (remember those eight visits). And on top of that they want to purchase the e-mail addresses of all the people I refer for $0.02. 

Come on, I'm not a fool! Even the Spam masters pay more per e-mail! 

A nice additional feature for this whole affair is that their signup process is unnecessarily complicated and many of my visitors have complained that they do not see a reason to sign up, because they can read the articles anyway. Others, people who have decided to subscribe to Themestream, said that they canceled the subscription process, because there is no way to finish the subscription without signing up for a mailing list. 

The bottom line is Themestream will pay me $0.02 for every unique person I send there who has signed up for their mandatory Spam service and who has visited my article.

Come on, people! I cannot force that on my visitors and I don't want to. 

I think that by providing quality content and visitors to Themestream I have given them more than a fair deal. I do not deserve to be treated like a criminal. 

It would also have been nice, friendly even, to receive a note prior to any policy change.  I wasn't even notified of their change of policy until AFTER it was implemented. 

I want be able to reliably access my articles (their service was awful for the last few weeks) and I want to have my voice heard!

I have been so disappointed with Themestream's performance that I dropped all their leads from my site. I will not be their doormat. If you provide content to fill their coffers I hope you won't be a doormat, either. 

Stop bringing people to their site! It is the only way to show Themestream that we are their most 
valuable assets. Show them that we want to be treated with respect! And let's see what Themestream advertisers will say about this!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Maria Stefanova is the owner of LG Software (http://www.lgsoftware.net), a company which aims to make SAT, GRE and GMAT preparation more easy, funny and effective, of course!

Maria has other articles at Themestream which you may want to help her earn two cents from.  

What you don't know (about SAT prep) can hurt you http://www.themestream.com/gspd_browse/author/view_author_info.gsp?auth_id=232861

WorkOut For The Busy Student http://www.themestream.com/articles.329330.html

How To Build Your Career While Still In College http://www.themestream.com/articles.338578.html

Minimize Your Office And Equipment Start-Up Costshttp://www.themestream.com/articles.341099.html

Themestream is part of a trend on the web.  Companies will start out with top pay, then drop suppliers and boosters entirely, or drop pay rates to a mere pittance.  Time and again we have received notices that thank us for all our help, but --- the time has come to become more profitable.

If this subject has been of interest, you should also read the affiliate integrity article by Earl H. Roberts

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