I’m not sure if my lensrank woes are merely seasonal or a combination of recent changes. Summer is typically slower for me. (Makes sense with a primarily education niche.)

Lensrank is AMAZINGLY competitive. It’s so bad for some lenses that I’ve even considered deleting them. I haven’t, but it’s bad for morale to see a lens with 180,000 LR. My worst performers are former groups. I sort of wish I’d just deleted them when they were converted to lenses. The vast majority have not been high performers –ever.

One thing that still seems to have strong but temporary effect is angel blessing. But without squidcasts, I’m seeing fewer of those.

I’ve joined Wizzley. It’s a good platform, for sure. But there’s no direct payout. It’s all through adsense or other affiliates. Squidoo is really a better money maker on that hand because I don’t write on profitable adsense topics.

I am really curious about Hubpages. I know some writers are migrating their articles from HP to Wizzley. I don’t know what to do with my HP. They don’t give me nearly as much return as my lenses. Sometimes I wonder if diversification is worth it. Squidoo works. Why change? But everyone says I should diversify. So based on their wisdom, I’m branching out. But so far, I’m not seeing much promise ($ly I mean). I know it takes time, so I’m trying to wait. I guess I can always transfer content if necessary.

One you didn’t mention is the changes they made to the Discovery module allowing lensmasters to monopolize all six spots which relagates it to a featured lens module and doesn’t generate the traffic it use to.

I agree with AJ and Christene, if you haven’t tried Wizzley, you should. Although, if you live in one of those non affiliate Amazon states, the sales potential isn’t as great.

Many of us were making use of the Bio as being a prime place to put banners and of course any change that hits income potential will wake people up and have them working on lenses that were just being left to “simmer”.

I am hearing from a senior hubpages publisher that because of the way they handled their Google Slap they have managed to upset a lot of their top publishers and they are responding by not being as active and going in to “wait and see mode”. There’s rumors it may be sold and the time when it will become obvious if it is going to happen will be after the summer.

Some are moving their content. I have never been prolific at Hubpages but I have moved two non-performing hubs to Wizzley, which along with Christene, I can highly recommend. It is run by people I know and trust and they are very aware of the value of the owners maintaining close contact with the members. Publishing standards are also high in order to maintain the quality of the site.

Also, the learning curve at Wizzley is not huge and making and publishing pages is a lot faster – give it a try, I think you will like it.

Like you, although my Squidoo income is gradually increasing, my Squidoo goals have taken a knock and reaching them will take longer. But my long term goal is to earn the bulk of my income from sites I own – the happenings at Squidoo and Hubpages have shown me that we will always be vulnerable all the time we publish on sites owned by others and subject to the decisions of others – I also have a theory about sites owned by younger people as opposed to those who have more experience of life in general, but that would make a whole blog post in itself – perhaps I should write it

Silver lining: the increase in tier payouts has made this my best year yet on Squidoo. I’ve already earned more than 2007, 2008 or 2009, and I’m way up from this time last year.

(You need to join Wizzley! It’s shiny and new… and small, so they are very attentive.)