Don't endanger your residual income!

There are many writing sites out there, and a lot of them use revenue share to pay writers. Unfortunately, as I have often witnessed, some writers tend to have an emotional investment in sites that then have severe software problems. These writers then tend to make excuses for the bad software, without realizing that their ignorance of the way software works enhances the ability of revenue share sites to delay or lose payments, and thereby the writers for these sites may lose significant income.

I have in mind the example of a site that was supposed to post daily payments. However, at certain random times, the payment was not posted on schedule. In the forums for this site, writers often posted comments like “Well, perhaps they’re behind because it is tax day,” or “It’s a major holiday, so maybe nobody is there to post it.”

If a web site is posting regular payments manually, don’t write for them. (I am not talking about contests, or other types of bonus payments.) There is no excuse not to have a programmer write working code to post payments automatically.

The thing about software is: it doesn’t care what day it is, or what time it is. Software runs, and when certain conditions occur, it executes instructions. If the instructions do not execute, either 1) the software is buggy; or 2) the conditions have not been met. With all the tools available for testing, there is no excuse for buggy software except greed or laziness. If the conditions have not been met, then there is a simple enough way to program in a message to print out that the conditions have not been met.

Software executes these instructions regardless of tax days, or major holidays, or really anything except massive internet failure. So if you are one of the writers making these kinds of excuses for revenue share web sites, you are compounding the problems for yourself and other writers, because your ignorance of how software works allows these sites to continue to delay payments, or to reduce payments.

You can educate yourself on software by taking a basic programming course. It doesn’t have to be a college course, and you don’t have to understand everything; nor do you have to get a good grade. But an understanding of how software works will enable you to understand the real problems revenue share websites have.

Revenue share sites that pay through Google AdSense publishing are exempt from this problem, as long as the correct percentage of the time your publisher ID is displayed. So if you haven’t signed up for one of the Google AdSense revenue share sites like this one, perhaps it is time you gave them a try!