My Single Mom Life

Awhile ago, I told you I had taken a leave of absence from a paid to blog company, but didn't tell you who.
I finally received my last payment from them today, they owe me nothing, I owe them nothing, no more ties.
I no longer work for them.
I feel like I can tell you who and why now.

I no longer work for PayPerPost, due to the constantly changing ToS, and the direction the company is going.
I no longer feel comfortable working for them, I've actually felt pretty scummy for some time now.
When I started, I needed the money badly, I had bills to pay, kids to take care of, and it was far too easy to make money. I knew some of the things I was posting about weren't subjects I normally would have, so I pulled back, really tried to just post about things I knew about, products or sites I had used, I was trying to feel better about what I had done.
I do feel bad, the money was screaming my name and I took it.

But after many incidents with their customer love department, bloggers being accused of violating a constantly changing ToS that we were never told about, advertisers having to pay for truly shiteous blog posts, serious questions being ignored, and the constant problems with the system itself from major site lags which caused our sites to load slowly, to users not being able to use the captchas, to bloggers being accused of cheating, favoritism accusations, programs failing, and the constant stream of complaints from the bloggers to fix the system and it all fell on deaf ears most of the time.
Even with the super new and improved system Argus or Izea, whatever they are calling it now, being deployed in November, I quit.
Maybe the new system will be fucking fantabulous, but I no longer feel like I can work for a company that treated people the way they did, and the constant problems they have.
We were told so many times that our blogs were our own, but they kept changing that ToS to include little things that made us change how we blogged, and I don't like how the new system is set up. What I saw, and the little bits they keep talking about vaguely, makes me happy I got out now. I don't like the RSS feed thing they have which pulls keywords out of our posts, breaks down our posts into easy to read blurbs.
I don't write my posts to have them hacked apart by that thing.
I write them to be read as they are.

It was a very tough decision to quit working for them. I have bills to pay, kids to care for, but no amount of money could make me feel good about myself anymore.
I'd rather be broke and struggle, than to feel like shit inside.
I know I stand a great chance of a lot of back lash from them and the bloggers who still work for them because of this post, but I haven't violated the NDA I signed about the new system Argus, which I only saw small parts of anyway, and I haven't done anything wrong except state my reasons for leaving.
Call it drama, call it hate, whatever.
But I felt like I owed it to my readers to be truthful about it.
I had encouraged fellow blogging friends to sign up with them, and I feel bad about that.
Some of the people I encouraged to sign up, never went to the forums there to see what was going on, they never read the constant complaints, they don't know about all the bad press all the time, they never got see the 28 page long threads about the changing ToS, hell, I don't even know if they know there are things they can't do anymore, but as was said to us bloggers, it's our job to read the ToS for changes.

One of the biggest reasons I left though, was what they did to my friend Christine.
Back in April, she won a contest they had to go to postiecon when it was to be in Orlando.
Then they changed the venue to Vegas, but still said she was going.
Postiecon is next month, November 8th through 10th, and they still have not contacted her about her prize which was supposed to include airfare, a hotel room, and a car rental, as well as full access to postiecon and several segments of Blogworld.
She emailed the contact person at PPP several times, she private messaged them on the forums, and the only answers they ever gave her were, "I'll look into it and get back to you."
No one ever did, and postiecon is next month.
That bothers me a lot.
She wrote the most awesome entry for the contest, it took her days to complete it because she used her paper crafting skills to do it, die cuts and stamps, she wrote an awesome story.
It really bothers me that she won it fair and square, was promised the trip, and they still haven't made any arrangements for her or even gotten back to her about it.
Even if they get back to her now, she won't be going. She made other vacation plans because they wasted so much time not fulfilling their word.
But to me, that's par for the course.

All of their buttons and badges have been removed, the site tracking codes they had us install for certain posts. I am leaving all the entries I wrote for them here though.
I took a contract out with each and every one of those advertisers, and even though it was only a 30 days long contract to leave the posts on my blog, I never delete posts, and I owe it to them to leave them up. The advertisers themselves are not who I have issues with.

So anyway, I feel badly about how I let money rule me for almost a year. I let it take control of me and this blog, I posted about things I shouldn't have because money was too easy to make, and I needed it.
I let my readers down and I'm sorry for that.