by Nick Somoski

Created on: July 03, 2009   Last Updated: August 31, 2009

Helium is a website that writers come to and rarely complain about it. But, like any well-oiled machine, it does have its kinks. Helium's daily "statistics" is one of them. When it comes to this, Helium seems to be a bit "slow." As a writer, I want to see exactly how I'm doing and how my articles are doing at the moment. With Helium, it doesn't happen like that.

This has always been a downside of Helium to me. There are several things this affects. First, let's start off with the daily star status. Each day, I log onto Helium and go to my home page, where, on the right, it shows the number of rating and writing stars I have, as well as my writing percentage, rating percentages, and the number of articles I have written. For the rest of the day, it stays exactly the same.

This has always bugged me like nothing else. With each article I write, I want to see how my writing percentage changes. Did the article help me or did it hurt me? After rating articles, I want to see the number of articles I rated. Did the rating hurt me or help me? These things I can't find out until the next day. Even if I rate over 100 articles, I won't know it because the number doesn't change until the next day.

This has proven to be a problem for me in the past. On the second to last day of the month, I had somewhere around 390 rates. I wanted to get 500 rates in total to get that extra $3 bonus at the end of the month, so I rated many articles to do so. Unfortunately, I didn't know how many articles I had to rate. I rated what I thought was around 150, but when I logged on the next day, calculation day, I only had 492 articles rated. Could you just believe how upset I was over this?

The problems don't stop there, though. A similar thing happened to me last month. I had been going between 3 and 4 stars for a few days, since my rating percentage kept going up and down from 85%. I had written many articles on the second to last day of the month, with my rating score at 85.13%. I was really hoping to hold onto this so I could get more money for upfront payment per article on calculation day. Unfortunately, the next day my percentage was at 84%. Again, if Helium would make their statistics real-time, I never would have had this problem.

It happens in other areas of the site, too. Your article ratings don't change until every half hour. Contest standings only change every so often when they should be changing every couple of minutes. One of the biggest problems is with payments though. When Helium pays you for upfronts, contests, or whatever, you have to wait until the next day to see your earnings. Your residual income (from page views) is only updated every so often, when it should be updated every second . . . in real-time.

Again, if Helium held their statistics in real-time, these problems would never occur. So my answer is absolutely yes, Helium needs to change to real-time. With the technology nowadays, it shouldn't even be a question. It would benefit all their writers in many ways. As long as the statistics are accurate, why make us wait a day to see how our statistics have changed?

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