I began working for Examiner.com a few months ago and at first took things very seriously. I wrote numerous well researched, well written, informative and neutral articles pertaining to local politics.
The first problem is that writing these good solid articles on any topic will not earn you many views. The only articles that typically get significant views are controversial and hyped with numerous engineered title keywords etc...
If you do engineer your articles for views (they explain how to do this) you can get a lot of views but you are basically pumping dribble out into the internet world looking for reactionary comments and views. After realizing this I said the heck with real journalism, my 20 cents per article isn't enough - I started doing the whole reactionary thing and actually received several thousand views (about 20 bucks) from each article on the first day of writing. However after promoting these articles and getting tons of digs/tweets etc... My views would consistently drop to well under 300, then within 2 days down to 20 or 30 then after 3 days I would supposedly not get any views.
There is no doubt in my mind that Examiner.com deliberately cuts off your pay after you get a certain number of views. They don't let you count your own views (wonder why...) and as soon as I raised any questions about why this was happening (how does an article get 2000 views on day one, then with more tweets, more digs, and higher Google rankings get 90 percent fewer views the next day, then no views at all?)
This site is a true meat market of content. They want you to work your butt off and if you actually get some views they deliberately don't pay you. Read the fine print way down in your contract - they specifically say that they own your content, and they can choose what they want to pay you. This info is all right there so in a way they are not lying - they say explicitly that they don't have to pay you - but they sure do hide it well.
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