Review of Content Marketplace Helium

Yesterday I spoke with Mark Ranalli, Helium CEO about their content marketplace. Helium launched in October 2006 and has over 100,000 active writers with over 600,000 stories accepted into the system.

The idea is pretty interesting: Publishers post requests for content and then writers post their stories for review. The publisher then selects one, based on their review plus user-contributed reviews. The other articles that are "left-over" remain on the Helium site and form a topic area in which articles are rated and the best content moves to the top. Writers earn a rev share on the ads that are supplied by Helium on the left-over content.

For the story that gets selected, the publisher pays the writer the agreed upon price. Checking out the available stories, the prices range from $15-$75 and Ranalli notes that they have stories with prices upwards of $200/story. Helium charges a 20% fee to the publisher and the publisher also pays a listing fee.

Their latest announcement is a partnership with the National Press Club (NPC). Since stories are rated, the NPC will select some of the best stories from citizen journalists into the NPC.

I like this concept because if your story isn’t selected, it still has a venue to be seen. The revenue from the left-over content side won’t be enough to retire on, but I am guessing the visibility for the writer is more important towards future article acceptance.