I've found the greatest success with eHow, but it took a couple of months before decent earnings started coming in. And, by decent, I'm talking about a "paying the gas bill" sort of thing.
I like working with clients best (and the pay is much better), but sites like Textbroker, Demand Studios and Bright Hub can be useful when you're just starting out as a freelancer and want to have a cushion.
I prefer HubPages, though we are not paid by submitting articles, yet we earn not only from adsense, but amazon, kontera and ebay. Most of my amazon sales are from my short hubs. I don't really like AC because they buy your article, your great piece of article is paid once with no royalty - while in HubPages or squidoo, your article stays there for years and they can bring you constant money. I heard that some writers in HubPages also got job offers as copywriter from web companies.
Then only offer nonexclusive rights. They offer that option (or at least they used to - it's been a while since I've bothered with them for anything).
You can try informativepost.com. Its hard to approve actually but you can go to marketplace for more job. Today.com - This is a blog concept you got paid $1 for 1 post on your blog. Minimum is only 100 words for each post to get paid. There are more opportunity beside AC.
I think AC is going to dead...... because long time ago, the price for one article is about $4-6 But now only $1-2 They become incentive.
There are a lot of places you can submit for performance payment... (maybe even too many of them). But anyway, if revenue is just your goal, I would say you should try eHow, HubPages and Xoomba. As far as upfront payment, Helium offers this for writers with good ratings. You can also try Informative Post and Textbroker, (though their site seems to be down right now). If you go with Textbroker, you'll be writing content for clients instead of an actual site.
Associated Content is nice, so is Bukisa; however, there are more sites available: www.demandstudios.com www.suite101.com Textbroker is a nice site as well, especially once you reach a five star level. The only downside is there are hardly any high paying five star jobs; the upside is connecting with clients to obtain direct orders, this is how you make money on Textbroker.
Has anyone heard about Xomba.com ? They let you put your own adsense code in the articles and ask to share the earnings 50/50. I have no experience of this though.
I disagree. AC is not dying, they are just getting slammed by spam and too much junk. They're weeding out the crap articles by offering lower payments, thus turning away black hatters. AC still pays well for quality.
I wrote over 100 articles and got on average $4 per article from AC. However, they banned me because my articles kept getting spammed with traffic. Shame, they could of earned much more off of me.
I've heard a lot of people complaining lately about being flagged as spammers. Sounds like you were getting too much traffic and they didn't want to pay you for it
While I'm glad you're happy with what you were paid for your work, $7 is still ridiculously low for any remotely serious writing. Yes, it's better than the $5 and under gigs you'll see advertised in some places, but it's also far from being paid "well" as a writer. It's very much on the extremely low end of the spectrum.
I'm speaking of AC articles only. Someone getting paid $1 for an article at AC is obviously doing something wrong. A payment of $7 is considered well on AC itself, as far as other websites, yes you can make a lot more. An experienced freelance writer really has nothing to gain from AC, it's a good starting point for someone though.