eHow
Reviews and Complaints

Inaccurate information and won't respond to correction request from manufacturer.

99% of their articles are worthless trivia. Why does Google rank them so highly?

I agree completely. Ehow is totally worthless.

Not only do the contributions from writers for EHow constantly get things wrong but they try to cite-source from old articles not applicable in the real life anymore. Websites that don't even have the information relevant to question. Take for instance:

http://www.ehow.com/about_5506130_herbalife-problems.html

Not only was the information posted as an actual right answer; wrong, but seemed biased to spreading old and untested rumors.

The "contributor" said that herbalife contained lead. Yes, the company was being sued for putting lead into pills.

No there was no actual lead in the products and the lawsuit was dropped. Both institutes(FDI/CAI) were forced to write a formal apology to Herbalife after testing the product, finally.

The "contributor" also listed sources to view. So I viewed them. One site is a link to an ingredient glossary of Herbalife. Nowhere on that site was lead listed. So how useful was that source?

Another source was dated from 1986. 1986. 20 years before the lawsuit. 10 years before mainstream Internet.

I half want to reference vampires and werewolves but I am scared that Ehow will try to convince me that those myths are true also.

I

This is very true, flea products can kill rabbits. The best way to remove fleas from rabbits is to apply FRONTLINE to your dog or cat and keep them in they area of the rabbit. If you do not have a dog or cat, consider adopting one from your local shelter and use Frontline, it is better than the rest. I groomed dogs for 8 years, now I raise lionhead rabbits. Frontline users never had fleas, while people that used other products on their dogs complained that it was not working. They were correct, their dogs were loaded with fleas. Also, dog frontline can be used on cats, been doing it for years now with no negative results. hillbillyhares

Ms. Renee (Possible Rene) Mattison sold a plagiarized resume to a community college student in September of 2013. I have the document, the testimony of the student and screen shots proving the blatant disregard for eHow and its intellectual property. I'd like to know if eHow is interested in pursuing this or if you simply don't have the resources before I go through all the trouble of screen shots and protecting my anonymity, and safety against possible retaliation from this person. [protected]

I wrote for ehow.com for over a year. New company bought them. They wanted to buy me out, or I would lose my stories anyway. I accepted their offer. I was to receive half on June 15, 2011 the other half on July 15, 2011. The total from both of these were a little less than half of what I was offered. After about 40 emails sent to them, I am still not paid. I am getting the run around. If they did this to me, they probably did it to others as well. The amt. I am owed is a little over $400, so well worth pursuing. Besides, it is just not right. Please help me to get my money!

Auto Service Experts of San Antonio has the best prices and friendliest service of any auto repair shop in San Antonio! We have the price you want and the service you expect.

I wrote for Demand Studios for awhile. It was a decent way to supplement my freelance journalism income. If you are going to write for Demand Studios be very wary of editors who know nothing about the topics they are editing. I was writing health, fitness and nutrition articles, editors were making potentially fatal changes to my articles. When I'd constant the help desk, they would simply agree with the editor regardless of how off the wall the editor was. I don't want my name by inaccurate information!

I had discovered Ehowe.com about 2 years ago and began writing articles for them, I stopped writing articles when they introduced The Demand Media studio. I continued to get thousands of views on my previous articles and collected a small monthly revenue. This month I noticed that there had been no revenues deposited in my account and that my writer's account for Ehowe.com was gone. The thing that really made matters worse was that I was able to find some recently submitted articles with Identical titles to my articles that had slightly different wording than my articles and a different author's name.They have basically stolen all of the topic ideas from other writers. Very tasteless and may they get back what they put out times 1000.

I have written over 1200 published articles for Demand Media, and believe after that much experience I hold a balanced view. There a lot of dissenters out there these day regarding DM and their policies, and I have to say that as every day goes by, I find DM a company that through its actions become less and less relevant as a respectful place for freelance writers to work. Is all the content written for DM useless twoddle just to promote hits for ehow, and the like? No, many articles are well written, offering solid information. The problem is, there are so many articles offering the same advice/guidance (I myself wondered why there were so many articles that needed writing offering very similar info -- the sad answer, I must say, is that yes, it's there to generate hits, even it the majority of it is well written). Even though the majority of articles pay $15, and I'd say the average writer can make about $20 an hour after writing, researching, rewriting, etc., that is still fairly low for decent writers. Also, the appeals process for rejected articles, in my opinion/experience, bends largely towards the editor's point of view over the writer's. I guess perhaps it's harder to get editors than writers so don't upset the editors. I've never once had an rejection overturned, and must now consider the whole process a waste of time. I used to recommend DM to folks who needed extra income; now I wouldn't. I'll hopefully be moving on to better things, and I do feel that a company that treats employees in this respect won't be around in the long term.

It's better to have your own website if you really like to write and earn online. In this way, your efforts will not go to waste! No one will send you an email that your articles were already removed or are going to be removed from the site that you had applied for. Writing takes time so try to write and publish them in your own website. You can simply apply and add various advertisements to it then earn as much as you can as an online profit.

I wrote only one $15 article for eHhow. The editor asked for two small clarifications. I made them. The next editor rejected the the story, as not being on topic. (It was, or could be made so by adding one word to the title). They rejected the story. Did not pay me. They posted the article as I wrote it without my byline. They stated on site that there is a way to dispute an editor's rejection but after spending half and hour trying to figure out how, or should I say eHow, I decided I had already spent close to five hours finding a topic, researching, writing, and trying to find appropriate photographs for a measly $15 bucks (until recently I made $40 an hour as a copywriter) and this certainly wasn't worth my time. I already had ethical concerns about adding to the mountain of mostly junk they publish in order to sell ads. Now, I have concerns about the ethics of the company.

I write short articles for Demand Media but steer clear of the "revenue share" program altogether b/c I read the Terms of Service and didn't trust it. There's zero transparency, so I figured it wasn't worth the risk.

Writing for Demand Media is a fine exercise to keep my writing skills up while I take some time off to start a family, but I'm fully aware that I'm being paid about 20% of what I used to make as a professional writer, which is less than minimum wage in my state, and that they completely own whatever I submit, but it was an informed decision on my part.

I have trouble sympathizing with anyone who didn't read the TOS or take the time to really investigate the site before investing their time. It is what it is. Plenty of college students take unpaid internships to get experience, I see it as the same sort of thing.

I have been trying to contact ehow though their system and while my queries say resolved I cannot find any answers to my questions.

I have made about $50 in revenue by there are 2 distinct points where my payments were neither completed or carried over to the next month. They simply disappeared?

http://stepford-edarticles.blogspot.com/2011/04/another-victim-of-ehows-mendacity.html
I wrote about how ehow messed with me. They took my article down and replaced it with a watered down version of their own - but kept my links and my half a million fan base. It's theft not to mention copyright infringement.

I wrote an a eHow piece on a subject for which I am more than extremely qualified, and they removed it, in their email saying it was "factually incorrect." They removed most of my articles - on which I spent several hours each and included photos and detailed step-by-step guidance. I did not have time to argue with them. Now I see what they were doing. I applied for the DemandMedia site and they refused. I think they used writers to boost site exposure and now they are paring it down to their select group of family and friends. Just my opinion, even if I know it's probably on point.

Ehow is still reeling from its now famous ehow UK scandal. Hundreds upon hundreds of questions have bewen asked of Rich the silent one, and all he offers up is non-answers or "the questions are a non-issue". WTH? A non-issue, really? First you secretly clone all our articles onto the UK site without as much as a word to anyone. Then when your little game is brought to light, you insist its no harm, no foul. WTH? Really? You stole our articles, you placed ads on them on another site, and you secretly collected all the earnings and pocketed them. No harm, no foul, I think not. Then there is the ongoing outcry for lost earnings, that's right, Rich, lost earnings, due to ehow using redirected links from the UK site to the USA site. The day those redirects took hold, many saw their earnings stop or even worse, go backwards. You, Rich, called this another non-issue. WTH, really?
Is it really too much to expect a company as large as ehow to man up, to own their scandal and do what's right by its writers? I guess when it comes to truth, truth itself is a non-issue.
If you are in the right, Rich, get your a$$ over to the UK thread and answer the questions. Your writers have been waiting a couple months for you to do this, but you set back in silence like a beady-eyed little snake. Come clean and answer the questions.

eHow has always treated me fairly, given me a great opportunity and paid we well and on time. I've written for the company for 2.5 years.

I hope you don't mind, but i LINKED to this article/complaint from one of my articles...

http://www.infobarrel.com/The_Truth_About_Article_Submission_Revenue_Sharing_Websites

I think that there is plagiarism on eHow--I just don't know to what extent. One member (a friend of mine) had her very profitable article "swept" by eHow--which means is was removed. After that, her article (word for word) was presented as eHow of the Day--even using the original ideas she used. She had written an original article with ideas that she thought up for passwords. The "new" article even used her original examples that used relatives' names. Some people use software to scramble an article, then put it in a different form--which is a form of plagiarism because it takes someone else's ideas and words and shakes them around a little.

Let me say, that that is not what happened to my friend. It appeared that her original article was removed, then put back in exactly as it was by someone from eHow.

To "concerned consumer" - and interested parties

Here's the other side of the above "story"...

I'm a writer for the website eHow.com with over 200 articles to my name. My pen name is veryirie.

A Janice, from Denver, Colorado filed a report #450253 on May 9, 2009 about an article I wrote for the website eHow.com, entitled, "How to Warm a Cold Mouse Hand".

The user is saying I plagiarized this company. In fact, the user goes on to say they contacted the manufacturer and this comapny informed her the eHow article was not endorsed by them.

Of course, it's not endorsed by them. I am NOT selling their product, or any product. I am explaining step by step (with my own original wording and pictures) how to make a mouse hand warmer.

I'm not COPYING anything! It's ironic because two of the Google ads on my article page are from the company the "concerned consumer" accuses me of plagiarizing! If anything, I'm driving more traffic to the company's website, plus the fact I'm educating people to the fact that there even is such a thing as a mouse hand warmer.

Here is a link to my article: http://www.ehow.com/how_4732149_warm-cold-mouse-hand.html

I'd also like to address the fact that the "concerned consumer" says I was rude. This person opened an eHow account specifically to leave rude, spam comments on my article which eHow's editors removed.
Of course, I was angry. This whole thing is ridiculous and I find it irresponsible for any website to allow slanderous content such as this.

The "concerned consumer" requests that either I delete the article or name the company she's so concerned about. IF I named the company, in all fairness, I'd have to also list the other companies that make any product to warm a mouse hand plus the guys that make the hand warmer mouses. I cannot list just one company as that is considered spamming.

Neither myself nor eHow, have EVER been contacted by this company in any way, shape or fashion. I use the pen name veryirie on my personal blog http://veryirie.blogspot.com/ and on eHow.com where I have built up a very good reputation for quality writing.

I very much resent this unfounded, slanderous "report" by the "concerned consumer" and I appreciate your time in reading this.

HERE'S WHAT IS FILED ON [redacted] ABOUT EHOW'S PLAGIARISM.

I am a concerned consumer. I purchased a product, and then I found it being plagerised on eHow. I contacted the manufacturer of the product, and I contacted eHow. The manufacturer of the item told me the eHow article was not endorsed by them. I contacted eHow and never received a response.

Here's the story:

An Author on eHow.com has violated eHow's Rules and has copied a Trademarked and Patented item from the Internet. This is not allowed on eHow.com, so I sent eHow an email and asked them to remove the violated and plagiarised content. I never heard back from eHow.com so I am filing a [redacted].

eHow, you should NOT allow your authors to plagerise content from other websites!

The Author's pen name is "veryirie's." The name of the article is "How to Warm a Cold Hand." I contacted the author, and she was rude and ignored a request to remove the plagerised information.

veryirie's wrote an eHow article copying information from the inventor and manufacturer "IGMproducts.com." The product is available only through authorized resellers on eBay, Etsy, Amazon and through the manufacturer, IGMproducts. The instructions and pictures clearly illustrate plagiarism.

The eHow article is dated January 22, 2009. The item plagiarized was a patented product at the time the article was published on eHow. The item is also trademarked and can be confirmed through the USA Trademark Office.

Internet plagiarism is being approved & allowed by eHow. This is wrong. If a person takes ideas from another person or website, then that person or website should be listed as the source of the article's content. Or, prior permission to use the information should be received by eHow before publishing another person's content and ideas.

More should be done to investigate the plagiarism being allowed on eHow.com. It makes me think the website is a scam, and the authors are nothing more than plagiarists with too much time on their hands!

In all fairness to the manufacturer and the consumers who have purchased this item, I recommend the eHow article be removed or the manufacturer be named as a source of information.

All I have to say is Dan richter an ehow author stole my work after it was supposed to be pulled and returned when I didn't take the buy out a while back. He knows it and by stealing my work he only concedes that he couldn't do what I an others can... Write!
Ehow should be fully investigated by the federal government and demand media should be held accountable for not monitoring their workers. If your work has been stolen by them please let the world know

The people who control eHow have been doing this for years. That is why I would never write again for eHow. They steal your work when you start making a little money, and they make money off of it after you are not receiving any compensation. There should be a class action lawsuit about this. However, when you sign your life away to them, you even give them the right to take your work. DS is the worst company out there. No one should write for eHow because of their practices. Start your own blog, and get your own advertising. You will make more money in the long run. Hopefully, there is some way that you can get help for this terrible practice. Perhaps, some laws should be made to police the Internet companies like DS so that they cannot do this to people
Karma will eventually catch up with these people.
Sorry you had to experience this with DS (as so many have), but that is their reputation. Good luck in the future.

Wow, did not know that ehow was ripping off people. I mainly was tired of seeing the articles pop up in a Google search because EVERY article I look at has poor, simplistic information with no real substance. I mainly search for technical topics and it is frustrating to end up at ehow. It is a waste of time. For technical howto I try to hit places like instructables.

As to them ripping people off. You reap what you sow. They will get what is coming to them. If there is money involved and you can show a pattern you should be able to nail them.

FWIW, building a website, putting up content, and maintaining it are not that technical anymore. If enough of you freelance writers really want to make a dent in ehow then create your own consortium. You could do a webring, or build a monolithic website. I am sure there are technical people who would be willing to partner. Then you could basically create your own TOS, payplan, business structure, etc. Treat people fair, only make money when your writers make money, and plan for the long term, and you will beat them into the ground.

Facebook took $1000 of borrowed funds to start. They have no idea what that community is worth now.

I spelled compensation wrong because of my hard typing, but whatever! These ### are so wrong for what they are doing!

Does anyone have a phone number? An address? They are playing games with those of us whom they offered compenssation to for full rights of the articles. I can't log in, I get rude one-sentance replies from account managers when I email the zendesk...My paypal was closed because it was hacked, and I opened another one. Ehow says they have no choice but to send it to the closed account since that was the original on file, and they absolutly cannot send a hard check...Really? Since when does a company get to keep your money if you shut down your bank account due to fraud? There has got to be protection, right?

I think that there is plagiarism on eHow--I just don't know to what extent. One member (a friend of mine) had her very profitable article "swept" by eHow--which means is was removed. After that, her article (word for word) was presented as eHow of the Day--even using the original ideas she used. She had written an original article with ideas that she thought up for passwords. The "new" article even used her original examples that used her relatives' names. Some people use software to scramble an article, then put it in a different form--which is a form of plagiarism because it takes someone else's ideas and words and shakes them around a little.

Let me say, that that is not what happened to my friend. It appeared that her original article was removed, and then put back in exactly as it was by someone from eHow. Apparently, they are doing it to perhaps thousands of others. Something needs to be done.

eHow is committing theft of articles and nothing is being done about it. What about a class action lawsuit--I think that there are a lot of people who would join. Clearly what they are doing is unethical and illegal. Laws can be initiated to stop this evil. I really feel that the people at eHow who are perpetuating this scam will eventually get theirs because what goes around comes around.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, along comes that greedy ehow shark once again. This time they are pulling off the art of the $80 scam. Say what? Sounds kind of silly, until you begin to see the entire picture.

Back a while ago ehow announced it would begin to pay out $80 per article to hand selected ehow writers. Needless to say, many became excited at the thought of making $80 per article compared to the peanuts they had been paid up intil now. So people began to ask, how can we get in on the deal. Well, don't saddle up the horse just yet. If you know anything about ehow, its that they have mastered the art of double speak. No no, we didn't mean you ehow writers, we meant DS writers who also place their articles onto ehow.

that's what we meant to say when we said ehow writers. DS writers. So many just threw up their hands and passed the whole thing off as yet one more example of ehows lack of communication.

But was it really a lack of communication, or was something else much darker taking place, something well thought out ahead of time? Glad you asked. Breaking in blogs and news stories all across the UK yesterday was stories cheering on the arrival of ehow, proclaiming that ehow pays its top writers $80 per article. Now I would like to think my mama didn't raise any fools, and you can smell this skunk a mile away. Ehow knew exactly what it was doing when it announced ehow writers would be making $80 an article, when in fact it wasn't talking about ehow writers at all. That statement was put out there so they could feed it to a news hungry media over in the UK, and the UK took the bait without as much as asking any questions at all of ehow. In bold print, ehow to pay writers $80 an article. Unbelievable, Once again ehow the esow has proven they are indeed the kings when it comes to making dimes do the work of dollars. And talk about free press.

I have news for our over- seas friends, they are about to be hit with one of the biggest scam machines out there. ehow writers do not get paid $80 per article nor will they ever get paid that much.
Another story put it this way, some ehow writers will get paid $80 an article, while others can expect to make between $3 to $75 per article. Say what? They don't know what's about to hit them. This sow can't squeal, and there ain't enough scraps in the UK to satisfy its hunger.

Check out this news story and see how misleading ehow has been with the $80 per article scam they are now running. http://psmithjournalist.com/2010/03/exclusive-demand-media-now-accepting-uk-canadian-freelance-writers/

And here is yet another story that ran with the $80 per ehow article;

http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/2010/02/ehow-premium-article-writers-to-recieve-80-per-article/
EHOW SWEEPS GIVE YOU THE CREEPS?
Posted by THE PREACHER at 05:18 AM on March 06, 2010 Comments comments (0)

Hello, I am know as THE PREACHER and I am educating people to all of eHOWs dirty games. Lets talk a bit about those famous eHOW sweeps, shall we. Ever wonder what is really behind the madness? Yes, some are articles that are out of eHOW’s guidelines. Yes, some are poorly written. But many of these that get deleted are top earning articles. Thats correct, they are top earning articles, that have been in place for several years in many cases, only to overnight no longer fall within eHOW’s guidelines. How to hell can that be? What is really going on here?
Glad you asked. There is gold in your deleted articles, pure gold – for eHOW. I know, how can there be gold for eHOW in deleted articles. First lets look at just what your high earning articles have accomplished. They have matured and rank high on the search engines. They have developed a following, in as far as on line articles can develop a following. They have built up comments and views. And then eHOW comes riding in on its white horse and deletes em. All that hard work and effort is gone, right?
Don’t bet the family farm on it. EHOW wins on several fronts, and here is the secret to their dirty little game of deleting high earning articles. First, even though your articles get deleted, they are not totally gone, something very important remains behind and in eHOWs control – your URL’s. And therein is the gold, because eHOW takes your articles URL’s and redirects them to pages full of links to DS (DEMAND STUDIOS) so all your hard work and effort are now going to serve eHOW’s cause, promoting their DS articles.
These redirects are eHOW’s free bread and butter. The DS articles are already paid for, so all traffic they redirected to those articles is extra money in eHOWs pocket. An added bonus, they are now making money off the DS article ads and not paying for your articles any longer. It’s win win all the way around. Another bonus, all your deleted articles comments. EHOW uses the strength of those comments to help drive the DS articles even higher in the search engines rankings.
This is why eHOW is never clear as to why your articles get deleted. In many cases, there is no reason they can clearly state and point to. Oh yeah, we deleted your top earning articles so we can make a pile of money off of them – nope, don’t expect them to answer truthfully on this one. But now you know, redirects of deleted articles spells gold for eHOW.

If it still isn't clear, don't look at it as just your articles, look at the bigger picture. Ehow deletes thousands of articles at a month. Thats now thousands of articles they no longer have to make payroll on. That is huge. And every URL from every deleted article is now redirected back to a page full of DS articles that are simular to your deleted article. And these DS articles are already paid for for the most part, so another huge savings. Then there are those ads, all the money from the ad clicks, from people who went looking for your deleted article, all goes to ehow. It is a dirty game they play fueled by greed.

Hello, I am know as THE PREACHER and I am educating people to all of eHOWs dirty games. Lets talk a bit about those famous eHOW sweeps, shall we. Ever wonder what is really behind the madness? Yes, some are articles that are out of eHOW’s guidelines. Yes, some are poorly written. But many of these that get deleted are top earning articles. Thats correct, they are top earning articles, that have been in place for several years in many cases, only to overnight no longer fall within eHOW’s guidelines. How to hell can that be? What is really going on here?
Glad you asked. There is gold in your deleted articles, pure gold – for eHOW. I know, how can there be gold for eHOW in deleted articles. First lets look at just what your high earning articles have accomplished. They have matured and rank high on the search engines. They have developed a following, in as far as on line articles can develop a following. They have built up comments and views. And then eHOW comes riding in on its white horse and deletes em. All that hard work and effort is gone, right?
Don’t bet the family farm on it. EHOW wins on several fronts, and here is the secret to their dirty little game of deleting high earning articles. First, even though your articles get deleted, they are not totally gone, something very important remains behind and in eHOWs control – your URL’s. And therein is the gold, because eHOW takes your articles URL’s and redirects them to pages full of links to DS (DEMAND STUDIOS) so all your hard work and effort are now going to serve eHOW’s cause, promoting their DS articles.
These redirects are eHOW’s free bread and butter. The DS articles are already paid for, so all traffic they redirected to those articles is extra money in eHOWs pocket. An added bonus, they are now making money off the DS article ads and not paying for your articles any longer. It’s win win all the way around. Another bonus, all your deleted articles comments. EHOW uses the strength of those comments to help drive the DS articles even higher in the search engines rankings.
This is why eHOW is never clear as to why your articles get deleted. In many cases, there is no reason they can clearly state and point to. Oh yeah, we deleted your top earning articles so we can make a pile of money off of them – nope, don’t expect them to answer truthfully on this one. But now you know, redirects of deleted articles spells gold for eHOW.

If it still isn't clear, don't look at it as just your articles, look at the bigger picture. Ehow deletes thousands of articles at a month. Thats now thousands of articles they no longer have to make payroll on. That is huge. And every URL from every deleted article is now redirected back to a page full of DS articles that are simular to your deleted article. And these DS articles are already paid for for the most part, so another huge savings. Then there are those ads, all the money from the ad clicks, from people who went looking for your deleted article, all goes to ehow. It is a dirty game they play fueled by greed.

This is extremely true about Ehow. I have written for them for over a year. In the terms of service, this company claims that if they delete your account, please read as it is taken from their posted terms of service: Under the section labeled TERMINATION OR CANCELLATION :

If your Account or access to the Site is terminated for any or no reason, you may no longer have access to the Content you posted on the Site. In such event, eHow may continue to exploit electronic or printed materials it has created, or developed specific plans to create, that contain such Content according to the terms contained in Section 5 with respect to removal or modification of Content previously posted on the Site.

As you see, they clearly state they will continue to EXPLOIT your content, thereby still making money from it.

Ehow also does not always notify any member of any problem. If they deem you did something against the rules, they will refuse you payment without any proof. You are not subject to any sort of "due process".
Their Terms of Service also says they are not obliged to offer customer support. This says enough in my opinion to make it not worthy of any consideration. Anytime a company plainly states that they can continue to use your content after they terminate your account, and are not obliged to offer customer support, it is a red flag you will not recieve fair, professional treatment. This is why I no longer write for them and why I moved on to Examiner.com instead.

Dr. J.Stuart Rahrer responds:

Thank you for your outstanding article. I also appreciate the insightful input of several other gifted writers. I wrote 1 article for Ehow and have since deleted it due to the overwhelming amount of criticism by professional writers such as you.
I have written 18 books and I am currently working on the19th and 20th at the studio in my nursing home, if you want to call it that. You may see my book titles and descriptions at Google under J. Stuart Rahrer. I am not trying to sell books or toot my horn in this group. Any way, most of them are out of print. However, I am compelled to make 2 points.

1. I think I may stop writing articles unless anyone knows if there are reputable, honest organizations who recruit writers like you instead of people with titles that appeal to members of the Mickey Mouse Club. For example: “How to make your bosom bigger”. I am certain people read this article. However, the issue is in a statement by John Steinbeck below.

2. Years ago I attended a John Steinbeck lecture. I remember specifically that he said, ”All I have as a writer is a gift and my integrity to live with”.

Thanks to you for bringing that thought back.

Dr.J.Stuart Rahrer (johnrahrer@hotmail.com)