Working for Yahoo, Part II

Today I approached my article for Yahoo Associated Content a little differently.  There's an assignment board that becomes available after you log in.  In it they have basic suggestions for articles that they want done.  I'm not certain if only one person gets each assignment, if a small number of people can do it, or if anyone can get in on the action until the expiration date.

Regardless of which it is, I grabbed one, wrote it, and submitted it.  One thing that I thought was odd, though, was the fact that unlike the articles that you submit on your own, the assignments always seem to be set to the minimum payment option with the least exclusive release options.  Considering that these are articles that Yahoo itself is requesting, you would have figured it would be the opposite: exclusive to Yahoo but encouraged to be written by having the highest payment options.

Since it goes the other way, though, I can only infer that the "assignments" are more like suggestions of things to do if you're out of ideas to do on your own.  So useful, but not really more profitable than your own work.

Mind you, I wrote it up anyway, just to see how it plays out.

But while I was looking over the assignments, I noticed one which surprised me.  "Write a mystery short story."  It surprised me because they explicitly said in their writing suggestions that fiction doesn't do very well on the network.  What's more, the technical definition of a short story is a story over 1,000 words and less than 10,000.  (Anything under 1,000 is considered a "short short" or "flash fiction.")  Indeed, the writer's guidelines for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine suggest that 2,500 to 8,000 words is the ideal size for their use.  Meanwhile, Yahoo's normal guidelines suggest that you keep your submissions in the 300 to 500 word range.

Complicating matters, I see that EQMM pays anywhere from 5 cents to 8 cents a word, but a submission is by no means guaranteed.  Assuming that as as new writer I'll only get the 5 cents, and further that my hypothetical story is the minimum 2,500 word length, then I'd earn $125 on a sale to them.  At the standard rater of $1.50 for every 1000 page views at Yahoo, I'd need more than 83,000 views to make that much on Yahoo.  That seems like a lot, but I haven't had anything published by Yahoo yet, much less seen what the numbers are like so I don't know if it is or not.

Seems like a lot, though.

So while on the face of it, EQMM seems like the better deal, there's a catch. Its not a guaranteed acceptance.  I'd have to submit it and then wait as much as three months or more to find out if the story was going to make any money at all.  Meanwhile, I could write it up and submit it to Yahoo and have it making money sometime in the immediate future.  And it would have to be soon, because the assignment for Yahoo expires in May, making the obvious solution of submitting it to EQMM first then dumping it on Yahoo if it isn't accepted a non-starter.

And of course, I'd have to actually write the story.

So what do you think?  Write a mystery for Yahoo and take guaranteed money that's probably less than I could make at EQMM, and possibly a lot less?  Or take the shot, go for more money, but without knowing if I'll get anything at all, with the three month wait?  Or maybe just say no thanks, and keep doing YAC articles instead?

Any thoughts?