Squeaky voiced fun or a load of old gas? (Helium.com)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Helium.com
Date:	07/02/07 (915 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can write on almost any subject.

Disadvantages: Rating, lack of earnings, amount of time required to be successful. Community factors creeping in.

I joined Helium when I was temporarily banned from a consumer review writing site for reasons unknown and was bored. A lot had been made about this site on one of the satellite sites, so I joined up in interest to kill a few hours. After all, a new site must have something worth offering a consumer reviewer with six years experience, should it?

My initial impressions were very favourable. The site is easy to look at, avoiding garish colours, and well presented. As a non-member, I immediately saw a lot of topics that I was interested in and the site seemed to focus on quality of your work rather than your reputation. It's slightly different to other review writing sites out there in terms of layout and navigation, but while not perfect, is still fairly easy to use. Signing up is quick and painless and you can be active within minutes after Helium emails you a confirmation link.

Helium aims to be slightly different to the more common consumer review writing sites. Instead of, well, consumer reviews, Helium concentrates on advice, discussion and "how to…" articles, although it is possible to post consumer reviews and, unfortunately, creative writing. This has advantages and disadvantages. In theory you can suggest almost any topic and each one is vetted by a Helium staff member before being made active, but it's been my experience that a lot of topics have a very limited shelf life. Brad and Jennifer's divorce, anyone? The variety in topic quality can vary hugely from the aforementioned Brad versus Jennifer topic to lifestyle discussion issues ("Can Men and Women be just friends?") and on to general help topics ("How to improve the performance of your PC"). The quality of article that can appear in the topics can vary considerably (except those in Brad versus Jennifer, where they're all complete pants).

The rating system is unique to Helium. Instead of rating a single article on its own merits, you compare two anonymous articles side by side and make a decision on which is the better of the two. The theory is that you are rating purely on the quality of the article rather than your friendship with the author or fear of abuse or revenge rating. This really does have the potential to accurately sort lots of articles on the same topic and avoid all the usual flaws in systems on sites such as Ciao.co.uk.

There are huge gaps in the rating system, though. Firstly, at this time, you cannot choose what to rate. That's right, when you go into "rating mode" the Helium system presents you with two articles to compare. These tend to be within the same channel (top level category) that you have contributed to, but might not fall within your own areas of interest. For example, having posted an article on avoiding spam I found myself constantly rating reviews about how "hippies" are using the internet. After posting an album review, I found myself rating reviews about whether great singers were naturally skilled. In fact, when I first joined and started rating, it took almost four hours of rating before Helium started sending interesting topics my way. This has been one of the main gripes of members and is something that could potentially stop members from rating as much as they want (or could), which then means the site becomes less effective. People have the choice to post what they choose, but I don't think it's a good idea to force members to rate what they do not want to.

Additionally, Helium has its own members' forum where questions, queries, gripes and all sorts can be posted. Some Helium staff have been known to be quite active there, too, and while this can have disadvantages (it can feel quite intimidating at times if you're not going to be unquestionably positive about the site), it's still worthwhile getting everyone together in one place to swap ideas etc. Like anywhere else, there are those who will pootle along taking everything at face value, there are those who will ask questions and suggest changes, those who are only interested in themselves and the usual attention grabbers. However, a big round of applause must go to Reiko Yukawa who is an extremely helpful and patient Helium member, often giving excellent guidance to anyone that asks, but at the same time making plenty of useful queries and suggestions to Helium staff.

The forum is useful, but most of the features normally associated with a message board have been disabled (or simply don't work). It's impossible to quote another member and the board code for quoting (inside square brackets) remains, making messages difficult to read. Communication could be much improved by the activation of a few simple tools. A problem with having a forum on the site itself is that all too often members will post "I don't understand why people are complaining about [negative aspect]" and a staff member will applaud them for their forward thinking. I'm not sure what that achieves.

There are other negative aspects to Helium, though. I think the main negative aspect is the payment system. It's shrouded in secrecy, just like Ciao's Premium Fund system, though the Helium system seems to rely more on the number of non-members that rate your articles. That means that marketing your own articles is a pre-requisite if you want to earn some pocket money from the site. Like a lot of aspects of Helium, this isn't gospel and is more of an observation based on what people are posting in the Helium forum. In around two weeks of reading and rating on Helium, I've earned 6 cents (about 3p) for four articles. In the same period on Ciao, I've earned nothing and on Dooyoo, I've earned about five pounds. However, I've not been active on Ciao and while I've posted a few reviews on Dooyoo, my activity there has been substantially less than what I've put into Helium in the same time. On the positive side, the payout method is Paypal, so non-US members can actually get paid if they reach the cash out level and payments are made after the 20th of each month. I cannot confirm how reliable this is as these are claims made by Helium and it'll be many, many years before I reach the $25 cash out level based on my earnings so far.

Unlike every other review site I've encountered so far, there is no immediate payback from Helium. Yes, you can write your article and post it almost immediately assuming the topic exists, but at the moment, you can't get any feedback on your article (no comments system) and you'll be waiting a while for your articles to get rated. The Helium rating system may end up being a lot more accurate than those of other sites, but each single article introduces many more required ratings. (It seems that each article is compared to every other article in the same topic.) At the time of writing, I have four articles on the site. They've been on the site for over two weeks and yet none of the topics in which I've posted seem to have been sorted into any kind of order. For those who are used to review writing sites will be patient enough to hang around, but those new to this kind of writing are probably more likely to gravitate to sites such as Dooyoo or Epinions where non-monetary reward is available immediately.

I've found that the search engine is lacking somewhat. Trying to find members returns the right result more often than not, but not all the time. Hunting for specific topics is a right pain in the arse though and the results, while not completely pants are often erratic.

I'm also slightly confused by the messages given out by the Helium staff. On one hand, they're all for quality articles, often specifically stating that quality is what they're looking for. However, if you're writing for money, then quality matters not and it's your marketing of your own work that dictates your success. The members that are doing well (it's a relative term) financially are those with lots of articles on the site and also, your financial success is linked more to your own marketing of your articles than your ranking within the topics. That's not encouraging anyone to rate or invest in quality, so how Helium hopes to compete with other sites that (supposedly) rely on quality remains to be seen.

Helium appears to be a site that requires a lot of time to be spent on it (and related activities) to reap any decent levels of rewards. That certainly seems to be the case judging from posts on the forum. Some people have mentioned 0.1c per non-member read, which could potentially add up if you market your articles correctly. Others claim that writing topical articles also increases earning power (especially holiday related articles – Christmas, Valentines, Easter etc.) though how these seasonal articles can help Helium in the long run remains to be seen.

If you're used to other review writing sites, then you might find that the patience required for Helium is too much. While I don't expect instant gratification, waiting two and a half weeks (and counting) for my articles to be sorted is taking the mickey somewhat.

To me, Helium is a site that's in "Beta". For you non-technical people out there, that means that it's not quite finished and needs some heavy tweaking before it's ready for use. Having a site in "beta" is not necessarily a bad thing, but Helium is supposedly a "live" (i.e. finished) site, launching in September 2006. There are lots of things that don't work exactly as originally planned by Helium staff that are having a huge influence on my enjoyment of the site and there's a lot of confusion because no-one seems to have any concrete knowledge. Yes, there are positive aspects of the site and there is bags of potential and the staff are making changes to the site, but the earning potential versus time invested (compared to sites such as Dooyoo) and annoying features mean that I won't fully commit myself at this time.

The 8 week update:

The initial promise of Helium is fading fast, sadly. More and more, I feel the site is just another writing site with its own cliques and elite. Unhappy members are treated badly on the forums by those that are blindly faithful to the site. For example, people who are making a point about the rating system are told they're cheating the system by not rating and no-one's really pulling them to one side about this. One member, when I'd made a post about the lack of money, made a comment that I would be a millionaire if I spent more time writing and less time on the boards. This same member has posted 1100 comments in 12 weeks, I've posted 100 in 8 weeks.

I had concerns about some aspects of the site and I sent an email off to one of the site administrators. On a positive note, I had a comprehensive reply within a few hours but I found the answers to my queries unsatisfactory. Two questions queried the placement of certain members on the front page, including the site admin in question. A big deal is made on the forum about getting a front page article and yet these seem to come from a small section of the membership (and at times the same topics come up again and again). The site admin herself seems to get a placement far too regularly, pushing "writing" which is taking a place away from an ordinary member.

Another query dealt with members' behaviour on the forum being related to success, which was pooh-poohed. However, the predictions I made at the same time regarding a new and extremely enthusiastic member's appearance on the front page came true all too soon (and repeatedly). I have to come to the conclusion that forum behaviour can dictate your success on the site, too.

Site features are taking far too long to implement. To be fair, Helium has listened and they claim they are going to introduce features to help the rating system, for example. I'm aware that these things take time to implement, but it still seems like a long time. On the flip side, the forum is still feature-less and enabling these features (to help communication more than anything else) should be 5 minutes work.

The mantra of the site supporters is "give it time", and to be honest, I thought that the initial two and a half weeks between my joining and my initial review should have been plenty of time to get a feel for the site. But even now, eight weeks later, the stuff that bugged me is still there in the same form. With 17 articles on the site (about a third of them originals for Helium), I've earned a "whopping" $2.49 (£1.25)

The main thing that disappoints me about Helium is that I think it's just turning into another writing community such as Ciao, Dooyoo or Epinions where, for the most part, reputation rather than skill is dictating your success. I think that's sad because Helium did have lots of promise.

Summary: New(ish) writing site with plenty of flaws but lots of potential which it is not living up to.