A Redo On The Motorcycle Examiner
My National Motorcycles Examiner page.
Way back in early 2008 I was contacted about doing some writing focused on motorcycling for a new website called Examiner.com. (For many of you, this is not news.) I accepted that offer and became the Denver Motorcycle Examiner, with an Examiner site user ID number of about 79. Which is to say, I was the 79th person signed up to post as “Examiners.” Examiner.com still exists today and while they no longer give you a number, if they did that number would probably be around 100,000 or even higher. A lot of people sign on and then drop off soon afterward.
At first it was exciting. We were creating something new. It didn’t pay much but the pay was steadily increasing. As other motorcycle Examiners joined I contacted each of them and we banded together to promote each other to mutual benefit. And I was then offered the option to become the National Motorcycle Examiner. So I made that move.
For a couple years the thing just grew. Every now and then they would upgrade the blogging platform (which is essentially what it is, although they don’t call it a blog), and things just got better and we made more money. Then the frequent changes in how they figured our pay took a downward turn. Every couple months they would announce some new procedure and each change meant exactly one thing: We were going to be paid less. In a very short time these changes resulted in my earnings dropping by 90 percent. Does it surprise anyone that I cut way back on my publishing on Examiner?
It might be more surprising, actually, that I continued. But by this time I had put up a substantial body of work and as these posts continued to be read I continued to earn at least a little. If I stopped publishing altogether Examiner would stop paying me, although they would continue to benefit from my work. So in the last few years I have put up usually one piece a month just to keep the payments trickling in.
And now, I recently went in to post my piece for the month and found that all of my work for the first six months as an Examiner had been unpublished. I immediately assumed that another upgrade in the software had resulted in making the very earliest stuff incompatible with the current system. I sent a note to tech support asking but when they replied they said, “Gosh no, we didn’t unpublish those.” Like I believed that. Then a couple weeks later I got a note saying, “Hey, just wanted to let you know we had to unpublish your early stuff because it was not compatible with the current software.”
So this presented a couple options. I could just let those pieces be gone forever, or I could republish them in the new system. In some cases this is a no-brainer. Initially I did a weekly thing called “Where to Ride this Weekend,” which was a listing of upcoming rides and events. In 2008. OK, those can disappear from the world and that’s just fine.
But then there were others that are more, to use the common term, “evergreen.” That is to say, timeless stuff that is relevant regardless of when someone reads it. First and foremost among those are my ongoing series of posts entitled “Only a biker knows . . .: Motorcycle wit and wisdom.” You know that thing I end each of these blog posts with, the “Biker Quote for Today”? I save each of those and when I have 20 I put them all up in an Examiner post. Well, the first half dozen of those got unpublished. You better believe I’ll be republishing those.
And you know what? This means I can keep current on Examiner and keep my pennies and nickels trickling in without actually having to write new stuff. Also, in the early days Examiner didn’t have the ability to use a bunch of photos, so I had a lot of good ones that never got used. Now I can republish some of these pieces and offer some additional good photos that no one has ever gotten to see before. In fact, I did that with this most recent post I republished, “Top Gun competitors zig and zag their way to victory — Redo.”
By the way, that “Redo” at the end of that title is what I’m using to indicate that this is a republished article.
And oh yeah, sometimes I still do original posts on Examiner because that credential, being able to call myself the National Motorcycle Examiner, gets me press passes to things I want to cover. So it’s worth it. There was a time when I could (and did) say, “I’m going to work full-time as the National Motorcycle Examiner.” It was fun while it lasted. Those days are over. But it is kind of fun going back now and reading some of this old stuff I wrote so long ago.
Biker Quote for Today
“I don’t feel like going for a ride today.” — said no motorcycle rider ever
April 20th, 2015 at 3:02 pm
Interesting….havent heard from examiner on my stuff, I must be within the publishing window of compatible articles.