HubPages or Squidoo?

HubPages and Squidoo are alike in that they both allow the user to earn money by creating unique content and sharing that content with the host site. People using both sites are trying to drive more traffic to their own web pages, or make money from home, or have a web presence without their own site.

HubPages is to Squidoo like a ...

• text capsule is to a text/write module

• photo capsule is to a Flickr or Polaroid module

• video capsule is to a YouTube or Video module

• links capsule is to a link list module

• news capusle is to a news module

• rss capsule is to an rss module

• comments capsule is to a guestbook module

• eBay capsule is to an eBay module

• Amazon capsule is to an Amazon module

Please note, both sites are evolving rapidly and frequently update or expand their features, so this hub and its contents are subject to change as I review and compare all the new stuff!

Both web sites have little bits of tracking code that let a user earn a referral bonus for recruiting other new service/community members.

HubPages: When a new user signs up within 30 days as a result of a referral, the referring hub author will earn 10% of the advertising impression of that new author's hubs for the life of the hubs. Authors can build custom codes to track their own ad campaigns and referrals. You can access a list of who was referred via what tracking code, how many views that person's hubs are getting and even click through to see their profile and full hub list.

Squidoo: Originally at Squidoo, when new users would sign up via one of your lenses, the referring lensmaster would be in line to earn $5 when the new lensmaster has earned $15. From the stats page of the dashboard, you get a list of who signed up from one of your lenses and you can click over to view that person's profile and lenses.

My fave: HubPages wins this one, mostly because in the fall of 2008, Squidoo decided to do away with the referral bonus, but don't expect to get rich from referral percentages either. Overall, the folks who join up are going to mostly be duds unless you've got links bringing people in from an actively-writing web population and those people are looking to create. Looking at my Hubs to Squidoo traffic and vice versa, I've had more success bringing Squidoo writers to this site and getting them to build lenses than the other way round, but either program has resulted in more duds and/or spam than genuinely-good referrals.

HubPages: The overall Hub Traffic statistics shows an author one day, 7 day, thirty day and "ever" traffic totals. Also listed are the hubscores, # of comments and date of initial publication. Individual stats available for each hub include breakdowns of referrals within the one, seven and thirty day period, with prominent referrers listed by referral totals. In addition to what HubPages provides you, they also let you plug in a tracker from Google Analytics, thus giving you all of Google's feedback and stats on all your hubs.

Squidoo: Squidoo has *just* updated the statistics that they offer to lensmasters. Previously, there was nothing in the way of referral URLs, and only a few stats for weekly rolling traffic averages. The new stats show traffic trends, totals for visitor interactions such as emailing the lens or marking as favorite, referring URLs, royalty totals and recently purchased items from Amazon.

My fave: HubPages clearly lets you access more ROI, SEO and referral data on what you've built via Google Analytics.

Curious as to how the two sites compare when it comes to incorporating pictures?

On Squidoo, the forums were integral from the get go of the site. Lensmasters do a lot of mutual tentacle holding and help each other out a lot when it comes to getting answers and information. The forums (www.squidu.com) are a separate domain from the main site, so if by chance the main site is down, you can still go find out what's happening. In addition to the forum topics, there is an instructional article archive. There are community moderators who keep an eye on things and enforce forum etiquette.

On HubPages, there were no forums for just about the whole first year that the site was up and running, so the early users had to do whatever it was they were doing in on their own, or they had to contact admin directly via email for help. Part of what calculates into an author's HubScore is participation in the forums. Another way to phrase that is HubPages will penalize you for not interacting with the rest of the community. There are Hub-related topics as well as ones for general discussion.

My fave: Hands-down, it's Squidoo. Right on every forum page they have a statement of conduct, outlining what is not allowed. Here are their two of Squidoo's forum rules:

• Spam: just don't do it. Thou also shalt not fill the forums with multiple threads on the same topic or sockpuppet.
• Thou shalt not flame, harass, denigrate, spam, malign, or otherwise finger-point and name-call at other lensmasters, Citizens or moderators. This one's a biggy. This too can get you banned.

Whereas HubPages has a vague acknowledgment to forum conduct guidelines in their TOS, unless someone flags a post early, it's a free-for-all. You'll find flame wars (users fighting and insulting each other), sock puppeting (single users pretending to be multiple users), messages promoting just about any type of intolerance you can imagine, trolling (people making extreme posts in an attempt to incite flame wars) and spam postings all over the place. Not only that, but HubPages users frequently like to attack people en mass, especially spammers after the original spam post has been deleted, thus preserving a thread full of people hurling insults at someone who isn't even on the site anymore. And remember, this is the site that will penalize your score if you try and avoid the forums. All I can say is good luck and post very carefully at HubPages.  The forums are one of my least favorite things about HubPages.

On HubPages, hubs are ranked based on traffic, clickouts, sales, votes (thumbs up/down), visitor interactions and author reputation. HubPages has said they review content for originality, and duplicate content is automatically ranked down by filters in the system. Based on these shifting factors, each hub will rise and fall throughout the day within a fairly small rank range.

On Squidoo, lenses are ranked in numerical order, with each lens having an overall ranking amongst the entire pool of lenses and a ranking based on the lens category. LensRank comes from traffic, clickouts, sales, votes (stars) and visitor interactions. You absolutely must keep updating your lenses, or at least hitting the publish button from time to time, or you're going to fall in rank.

My fave: The larger Squidoo has gotten, the more exhausting it's been to try and maintain lensrank but literally putting in the effort can help hold that bottom line with the payouts. And Squidoo weathered the Google Panda traffic storms much more admirably than HubPages did this past year. With HubPages, it doesn't take the same type of site participation to maintain a high score but overall the site payouts have dropped and not completely recovered yet. Either way, each site will require effort to get established and how much effort you put into earning and then maintaining a high site presence happens is up to you.

One of the first things you find newbies asking in the forums on HubPages is how they can change the fonts, sizes, colors, backgrounds and all that other stuff that sent you running away from MySpace.

You CAN NOT change any of your colors, fonts or backgrounds on HubPages beyond what is built-in to the capsules controls themselves.  It makes for a very standardized look to the site, but it also keeps a certain amount of lollipop-school of design off of HubPages.

Squidoo offers a variety of HTML and CSS options whereby the slightly more savvy web writer can customize the look of their lens.  They have way more options for displaying photos, either integrated with text or standalone.  They are about to launch a series of new design templates to jazz up the basic look of the site if you don't know any programming.  And you can add just about anything that doesn't take any dynamic coding.

My fave: This is really a hard call.  On the one hand, I really like being able to bring a unique look to my pages and occasionally high-light an important point.  This has been hard to do on HubPages.  However, the lollipop design school has been flourishing at Squidoo as of late, and it's caused a lot of lenses to look like utter eyesores.  If you want a total custom look and you'd like to stick a few ad banners in there, you'll be much happier with the look of Squidoo.