For almost a year now I have been an active user of Helium.com under the same username. I have had mixed results, with some articles hitting the tops spots in their categories and others failing to reach even mid-way in the rankings. Over the duration of my Helium and Triond “careers” I have made approximately the same amount of money using the two sites, however I have recently began to dedicate a larger proportion of my time to Triond, due to the reasons I am about to list.

1. Freedom

On Helium you have to write to preset titles and within certain categories, this limits the amount of freedom you can have writing an article. You can suggest your own topic, however it must fit into Helium’s standards of acceptance before you can even get the chance of writing an article about it.

2. Views

I find that Triond has a much more appreciable system to tell users how successful their articles have been. Using Triond you can tell exactly how many views your articles have received, there is no such luck when using Helium, this means you have no real indication as to how well you have done with your article.

3. Money

Helium does of course give a upfront payment for each article that is written, but this is highly dependant upon your user rating, something which I find annoying. Despite the fact that Helium gives no indication of the amount of views an article receives it is in my opinion that the amount of views to money received ratio on Helium isn’t quite as good as it is on Triond. The amount of money a writer will be receive is also highly variable between the different channels. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is the indication I have received from my own experiences.

4. Rating

The ratings system in Helium is one of the main reasons that I dislike it compared to Triond. On Triond simply leaving a comment is enough to cement your like or dislike for an article, on Helium you must undergo the painstaking process of comparing articles to one another as a means of determining who is superior upon each subject.

5. Community

Helium, when compared to Triond, feels remarkably impersonal with limited contact between writers. Even the forums fail to satisfy the urge to have your work criticised and praised by other writers in the form of comments or “Likes”. Triond is for me a much more satisfying site to use when it comes to being social and advancing your writing skills.