Helium has become a competitive site for readers who want fact-based, knowledge articles - not Q & A stuff, not chatter or retorts to questions, not opinions - but information that will help them in their daily lives.

Follow the money. Which articles earn the most pay from advertising revenues, sale of stock content, and page-views? That's what readers want to read.

Channels: income-writing vs. pleasure-writing

Helium pays out proportionately to an article's value. The channels that are not eligible for upfront pay include a list of less-read articles: Creative Writing; Politics, News and Issues (PNI); Religion and Spirituality; Society and Lifestyle; Entertainment; Debate articles; "Recipes" under "Food and Drink" and "Other."

Why are those articles less worthy? - Because of their short-lived nature. People might come to browse through memoirs, poetry, and short stories; they might want to read some religious views; they might want to get some up-to-date feedback about PNI and Entertainment news, which will be outdated next week.

Shelf life

But articles of sustaining value must be written for a much longer shelf life. Valid, fresh, reliable information in Autos, Business, Computers, Health and Fitness, Home & Garden, Law and Legal Info, Parenting, Personal Finance, Pets and Animals, Science and Travel (plus others; Helium has 212 major categories) are expected to offer authentic information that will provide answers to readers looking for that kind of information every day of their lives.

Sources: sound and credible; opinions and non-credible

"Credible" information brings up another necessity for writers: citing sources and dating them. There are many unreliable sources (think Wikipedia), biased sources (think cable news - both sides), questionable sources (never heard of before), and outdated information (a month is a long time for some topics; a year might be acceptable in others), but readers should be given corroborated facts with sources so they can decide how valuable, how relevant, and how useful the information is to them.

When outdated, less-valuable information passes through the ratings, raters are expected to filter out the old and reward the more-recent, more-reliable, "better" information with top spots. With its unique rating system of writers rating writers, readers are "guaranteed" to see "pre-screened material" that got filtered through hundreds of members to earn top ranks.

Time-crunched readers know worthwhile material when the

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