If you ask how Helium gets its income, the obvious answer is by displaying advertisements in general and by "Google Adsense" in particular. This is the prime source of income.
Google Adsense is by far the most widely incorporated advertising channel for most of the websites that attract large visitors and viewer-ship. The uniqueness of Google Adsense is the placement of "context sensitive ads" at appropriate places all around the web-site. When authors write articles on any subject and as these articles appear in the site, Google Adsense picks up "key words" from the articles and places most appropriate advertisements adjacent to the article.
Any visitor or reader, who drops by, gets attracted by the ad and clicks on it to visit the web-page of the advertiser, this "clicking at the ad" immediately generates an income for Helium. The rate per click may vary considerably based on the relevance of the context, advertisers' rate of pay, hotness of the subject and so many other variables. Helium shares a portion of this revenue with its writers.
Helium will also be getting other advertisement revenue from other sources through banner advertising, or through referrals.
The secondary source of income for Helium is by selling articles in Helium to prospective buyers who may be other web-site owners who want web-content or print-publishers. The sale of Helium articles may take place either directly from the existing stock of articles or through the "Marketplace". "Marketplace" is where the buyer specifies the required Title, scope of expectation and the word-count and Helium writers write on them. The buyer selects one (or several) writes that suits them and pays Helium and its Authors.
If you ask how Helium makes "money", namely, their profits, it is simply their income from the aforesaid sources less their expenditure that include cost of website management, payment/ compensation to contributing authors, salary to staff and other typical business expenditures. Payment to authors include authors' share of "Page View Pennies", pay-per-article (now, "upfront payment", earlier, "Rewardathon payments"), author's share of Marketplace and other buyer-selected articles, bonus payment for doing 5-star rating etc.
If you ask how Helium maximizes its "money" (i.e. profits), there are several ways. Here are some of them concerning to the authors:
(1) By recently introducing a new condition that any writer, to earn money, should maintain a "single star" rating. Helium will be pocketing the income of those members who, due to some reason or other, fail to do rating at Helium to get 1 star. Even if the star disappears for 1 day, that one day's earning goes to Helium. If the author himself disappears from Helium, all his share now belongs to Helium!
(2) By the condition (which every author agrees at the time of joining) that an article once posted cannot be deleted from Helium, there may be innumerable articles written by authors who joined Helium in a fit of initial enthusiasm, wrote several articles and then finding that income potential from Helium is not much, discontinue from Helium. Those articles keep earning their pennies for Helium.
(3) By virtue of the condition that the minimum payout money is 25$, several authors who joined helium may find that they do not have much scope to accumulate that amount in any reasonable period of time and they may discontinue writing at Helium. That amount goes to Helium (and Helium once shared in some way a portion of that revenue to its ongoing authors as "page view" bonus).
(4) By having multiple articles per title, Helium ensures that there are many URLs that lead information seekers to Helium's site through search engines. Thus the number of visitors to Helium may be quite large in number. But the benefit of such visits to "a specific author's" article might get diluted in the process. In other words, the pennies that reach a specific author may be less, whereas the revenue that Helium gets is likely to be comfortable overall.
(5) By not specifying or declaring what the payment rate (per so many page views) and by not sharing any data about page-views that the authors get (which are of course justifiable as per terms and conditions of contract), Helium shares their earnings with authors in "some proportion" unknown to the authors. This is in contrast to other competitive sites, where such payment proportions are declared and page-view statistics of authors are displayed. This is one area, where Helium has scope for making money in a way conducive to their interests.
All said and done, Helium is a business organization and it is only natural that they make money in the best way. As long as the authors too get their rightful share WITHOUT EXPLOITATION, in a fair and legally and morally justifiable way, members will be quite happy to be in the Helium family in the long run. Helium is quite good in maintaining good relationships with authors and in coming out frequently with good schemes that make authors get hooked to Helium.