I used to be an avid HubPages fan. At its peak, it was mildly useful, kind of like instagram where you'd be able to discover new, useful projects/places/things

I used to be an avid HubPages fan. At its peak, it was mildly useful, kind of like instagram where you'd be able to discover new, useful projects/places/things and what not. During its time, AdSense was the craze, everybody wanted an account. Since AdSense was invite-only, application based, (don't know if it still is), the main criteria was to have a website/weblog with some useful content. A LOT of people, many even in my circle used HubPages to get their AdSense accounts approved. The process was simple - Open a hub, write a couple of useful articles, submit it along with your AdSense application and BINGO. Approved (for most, not all). Over time, slowly, HubPages started positioning themselves as a "get rich quick" scheme. This was especially suitable for them because they would also share your revenue from your AdSense account (60-40? I'm not sure). There were a LOT of affiliate products out there claiming to help you get rich quick with AdSense and HubPages. They allowed this nonsense to grow like a snowball. Now, I also made some money with their platform. Not too much, maybe about $100-200 in 2 months. I did try to scale my earnings, but realized the real guys who were getting rich were the ones who were teaching me (with courses, books) on how to get rich. Around 2008-2009-ish if I'm not wrong, HubPages became the hub of Spam. And then Google hit everyone hard with their algorithmic changes. It hit everyone really hard. Even some of my quality hubs disappeared over night. Ever since then, I learnt two lessons: 1) Don't rely 100% on someone else's (free) platform to host your content. Use your own or pay for it. 2) If someone teaches you how to get rich, you can be 100% sure he/she's getting rich because of you. I never looked back at HubPages since then. Today, I logged in and wiped out all information about me. Just had a look around and seems like not much has changed since I last left them.