by Mopes

Created on: February 04, 2009

Helium and Triond both have their pros and cons. There is no reason to pick and choose between the two services. If you're writing to make money, it's probably a good idea to hedge your bets to ensure that if anything ever happens to either service, you still have an income stream.

Despite the obvious being answer being that both services are worth your time, it's still worth considering the difference between both services.

Compensation

Helium pays upfront fees to their best writers. If you write a lot and write well you can make up to $3.50 per article before anyone even reads it. Helium also has contests and the marketplace allowing for a good writer to make quite a lot of money. Despite all of this, Triond does win for payout per page-view. Their service doesn't have any additional compensation options, but does reward heavily for having people read your work.

Quality control

Triond has editors that screen every single piece of work submitted to their site. They're quite lenient on what actually gets posted, though. It looks like they're really just looking to ensure the work hasn't been plagiarized and contains no explicit content. On Helium, the quality control is quite a lot heavier. While the site allows anyone to post anything, any low quality content will quickly be shoved to the bottom of the pile, never to be found.

Speed of posting

On Helium it's a matter of writing and posting. It shows up for the communities reading pleasure. Triond has a delay that can vary from as low as 2 hours all the way up to 48 hours. (It should be considered that Helium's rating process can take a while to place an article where it truly belongs.)

Freedom to write

This is where the biggest differences between the two services comes into play. When writing for Triond you can pick a topic and start writing. And when I say any topic, I really mean it. You can post something that has no relevance to anybody and it will be considered a valid topic. In fact, some of the stranger topics tend to be more popular. But on Helium, you are limited to specific topics. Of course, the debates are available if you want to post opinionated content, but overall there are many more limitations.

Fiction

Helium has a "fiction section" that allows fiction writers to post their work while Triond has an entire website dedicated to fiction writers. In fact, some of the most popular pieces available on Triond's published sites are fiction. If you are writing fiction (including poetry) it's your best bet to post it to Triond.

The differences are as common as the similarities, but it still stands: enjoy both communities for the security of your writing income.

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