Not that long ago there were a lot of people in the make money online crowd who were excited about setting up hubs on hubpages to make money. First, if you do not know, on hubpages you can upload content and they host it for you and the adsense revenue is shared. If you use hubpages to host your content you do not have to pay for hosting or domains and you can leech off some of the authority they have built up with the search engines. On the downside you only get 60% of the page impressions.

Anyway, hubs seemed like the wave of the future so I set up and account. Over the course of a month or two I created around 50 hubs on a variety of topics. I was inspired to do this by Ben from Make Money Online with Seo who was in on the hub phenomenon early. Ben created a lot more hubs than I did. I think he ended up with more than 500 of them. And for a while he was making good money. But the good times seemed not to have lasted very long.

Hubpages production exploded as internet marketers started writing articles. Google eventually took notice. It is believed that some sort of penalty was assessed to the hubpages domain which makes it more difficult for new hubs to rank in the SERPs today.

My experience with hubpages was more mixed than Ben’s. I would say that he was much more successful than I was. The reason that I only created 50 hubs was that they were not making me any money. I tried to create hubs in any as many different niches as I could. Some were drawing a little traffic from the search engines. In the past month my fifty hubs have had a thousand visitors come by but my CTR is terrible. On niche sites that I maintain I usually get anywhere from 3% to 12% of my intrepid visitors to click out via an adsense ad. But on hubpages? It was terrible. I had a CTR of less than 1%.

Now, clearly I was doing something wrong because others have done much, much better with CTR. I think the entire episode made me about $10 over multiple months. So, seeing as I was an especially slow writer back then, I probably made about $0.10 an hour for my trouble. So, for making money I have not had any luck with hubpages.

At this point the enthusiasm over hubpages has died down. They are probably still good for links, though even on this count I am suspicious. Let me talk about that for a minute. I think it is possible that links to a site from a hubpage that runs the same adsense ID will not be counted or discounted in some ways. I have no proof for this. I just have a suspicion due to the strange behavior of my sites in the SERPs when linking to and from sites with the same adsense on them. So, you may want to consider setting up a sole proprietorship and signing up for another adsense account under your business name. Just something to think about.

In the final analysis, I would say that hubpages have not been especially useful for me. I have had much better success putting my original content on sites that I own. One tip I would give you if you decide to use hubpages: Don’t put all your hubs under the same username, create multiple identities to better cover your tracks.

I’m out.