out of 5 stars by
AppAppeal Editor
Infobarrel.com is a shared revenue social media community. The site consists of how-to, do it yourself and knowledge media on a wide variety of subjects generated by the site’s users. Users who contribute content share in the ad revenue from the site. The site has a large number of articles and videos, which can be searched by keyword or browsed via well-organized categories. Some of the topics available for browsing include Culture, Geography, Health, History, People, Science, Technology, and Society.
There is a browser-based text editor available for creating articles and video articles. There are also templates available for a blank article, a video article, a how-to article and a review article. Users can subscribe to RSS feeds containing a particular author’s content contributions. Users can track their feed subscriptions along with the content they have contributed on their My Infobarrel page. The site hosts various contests from time to time, and there is a Things to Do page where users can help out on the site by editing articles that have bad grammar, spelling, etc. Users have an Achievement Score which is based on how much they have contributed to the site.
Infobarrel.com was launched early in 2008 by Ryan McKenzie and Kevin Hinton of Hinzie Media, Inc. The site is based in BC, Canada.
Competition to Infobarrel comes from sites such as eHow, Bukisa, About.com and WikiHow. All of these sites provide informational content with a varying degree of user-generated content. Bukisa is probably the site most similar to Infobarrel, with all of its content being contributed by users. Ehow consists of content provided by eHow professional authors as well as content contributed by users. About.com consists entirely of professional content, and WikiHow consists entirely of user generated content, but in a wiki format (articles are edited by numerous authors).
The Infobarrel site has a fairly uncluttered look and feel. The site is quite responsive, and page loads happen quickly. The home page has a convenient search bar as well as a listing of the major categories available for browsing. There is a convenient top menu bar shown on all pages of the site. Tabs on the navigation bar include Home, Create, Members, Blog, Contests and Things to Do. Advertising is displayed on the site, some of which is relatively obtrusive.
Registration at the Infobarrel site is free and is not required to view content. Registration is required in order to leave comments, contribute content or subscribe to author feeds. The registration process asks for username, password, full name and email address. Optionally the user is prompted for their Google Adsense ID (this is required to share revenue from contributions), an avatar, gender, date of birth, city and country. There is no premium membership offered to the Infobarrel site.
The InfoBarrel site is recommended to authors who wish to earn an income from sharing their knowledge in a particular subject area. The site has a large number of user contributed how tos, do it yourself and instructional articles and videos. Not all articles are of high quality, a lot of content is written just for the money.
English
Twitter followers:
1,239
Wikipedia.org
About.com
eHow
Squidoo
Quora
Examiner
Instructables
Scoop.it
Helium
myLot
on 05 Jun 2011 at 11:30
on 27 Dec 2010 at 02:12
on 27 Dec 2010 at 02:09
@Shawn - The site just surpassed 50,000 articles and is growing at a very fast pace. It may be smaller than its competitors, but it's gaining ground and is already surpassing some of the bigger content sites in the search engines. The number of articles by each writer varies although a few members have over 1000 articles, and several have over 100 articles. Anyone starting out should know that they need to write several articles before making a poor assessment of the site's earning potential. @AppAppeal Editor - It's disappointing to see that you rated the site 1 out of 5 without providing a reason. Your site overview is good. Is there a particular reason you rated it so low? Other than the mention of some "obtrusive" ads, the only negative I see is that some articles appear more for the money than the quality factor (something that happens at all these sites). I think some of the biggest selling points were left out of your review. These are the qualities and features that make InfoBarrel so great: - transparency in earnings - 75% to 90% revenue share - use of Adsense, Amazon, and Chitika for revenue - pre-approval process to ensure quality - hands on admin who listen and respond to the community - awesome, helpful, and supportive forum community - access to detailed Google Analytics - members earning over $1000/month and may around $300+ per month InfoBarrel is the best site that I've written for and I tried several. Like any writing site it is not quick income. I am earning well on my 200 articles. People looking for a new place to write should check out InfoBarrel. In January, InfoBarrel 2.0 will be released and there are many upgrades that will enable us to be more efficient writers. I hope this information adds to the review. They are facts less than opinion. Be on the lookout. I think you'll have to write an updated review! Thanks, JP (jpwriter)
on 15 Nov 2010 at 14:18