Helium.com launched its web site Tuesday with consumer-oriented advice articles and a business model based on paying writers for how popular their articles are and how highly ranked they are by other contributors.

Users can write about almost any topic, although personal finance and pets seem to be among the most popular subjects among the writers who have been testing the service on beta versions of the site.

The Andover, Massachusetts-based company has launched the site with 23 categories of topics through which users can search, such as food and drink, although CEO Mark Ranalli believes the majority of visitors will come via search engines like Google and Yahoo.

So far, the site has more than 80,000 articles that have been contributed by over 5,000 writers in the last five months since the company opened a beta site.

Writers with the most popular articles will receive a cut of the advertising revenue on the site, although Mr. Ranalli admitted that the amount might not be too high by some standards. Most of the ads on the site are powered by Google’s AdSense program.

“We take a portion of the ad revenue and pay the contributors based on the volume and interest level in the content,” he said. “If you write a high-quality article on personal finance, and many people care about personal finance, you wind up on the top of the stack.”

He said last week that some of the more active writers were earning “tens of dollars a month,” but he pointed out that Helium was not an active site yet at that point.

“We anticipate some of our writers will earn hundreds of dollars a month, but we’ll see over time,” said Mr. Ranalli.

Susan Nagy, a writer for the site, noted that she earned $20 each week. That amount went to each of the top 20 contributors based on the articles they wrote and the ratings of other contributors.

“It’s been a wonderful outlet for me to write in my spare time,” she said. “The contests were a lot of fun and rewarding as I was in the top 20 in both of the two weeks that I competed.”She earned a total of $40 total in the contests and is looking forward to writing for future contests. When a writer’s earnings reach $25, they can request payment, she said.

Competing for Content

Mr. Ranalli hopes to make the site into a kind of Wikipedia or About.com with reference content that users will come to when they want to look up information on a particular topic.

But his site will be different from those earlier reference sites since users will be credited for their entries, unlike Wikipedia, and the articles won’t be commissioned as they are on About.com.

Anybody can write about any topic, and Mr. Ranalli believes the highest-quality content will be the most popular and highest ranked.

Helium.com has applied for patents on its user-ranking technology, and Mr. Ranalli said it will be difficult for users to “game” the system, as members of some social news sites such as Digg.com have been accused of doing.

“The patents are around how to sort out order from the chaos of user-generated content,” said Mr. Ranalli.

Peer-Ranking Process

Members are given a list of 25 to 30 articles to rank. The community goes through a peer-ranking process to sort out which is the best article on a particular subject. About 35 to 40 people might collaborate through Helium’s peer review process to rate the different articles.

“They’re definitely innovating in the right direction,” said Andrew Frank, a research director at Gartner. “Whether that particular model works and shows itself to be game-proof will take some evolution before they can figure out to how to monetize that kind of consumer content.”

He pointed out that there are different models for how to monetize consumer content.

“I like the fact that this one is focusing on how to compensate contributors, which is a distinction from the wiki model,” Mr. Frank said.

He noted there are advantages and disadvantages in Helium’s model versus that of its competitors.

“Competition from sites like About.com that basically have hired writing staff is not going away anytime soon,” said Mr. Frank. “But there is some potential to combine consumer content and consumer-generated metadata to make a more efficient model than the straight media model.”

Helium has been venture funded by Signature Capital, a boutique firm based in Portland, Maine. Mr. Ranalli would not disclose how much money his company has received, but he said the site was “exceptionally well funded.”

Contact the writer:MCohn@RedHerring.com

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