Webupon

Qassia is, to quote their About Qassia page “a credit-driven intelligence engine coupled to a cascading tag-based web directory”.  In other words, Qassia is a content site offering users various incentives to publish information there.

While Qassia does allow users to earn by displaying Google Adsense on each piece of information (called intel on Qassia) that they publish, the main focus of Qassia seems to be to help users build backlinks. Qassia will allow you to post a backlink to a site of your choice for every intel that you submit. You can also create links in your intel itself, although these will be “nofollow” links.

Each piece of intel submitted is rated by other Qassia users, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest, on how informative they feel that piece of intel is. Intel is only displayed on Qassia(along with their average rating) after at least 12 users have rated it and it has not been reported for violating Qassia guidelines.

One of the prominent features about Qassia is it’s use of Qassia dollars. Qassia dollars are not  “real” dollars, but are used by Qassia to measure Qassia credit. Users are given Qassia credit for submitting intel, referring people to sign up at Qassia, and by rating intel. You can assign Qassia credit to a backlink of your own. The more Qassia credit a backlink has, the higher Qassia will rank it.

Qassia has made quite a few changes to their site over the past few months. When Qassia first came out, they allowed content previously published elsewhere, be it for those published elsewhere under non-exclusive rights or for content that the author had given permission to be published elsewhere. Since then, due to the screening and publishing process having to take longer and longer, Qassia is only allowing content not previously published elsewhere before. In other words, they’re claiming first rights to content published on Qassia.

Another change that Qassia has made just recently is that creating a Qassia account is no longer free, due to the abuse of the system by users who were creating multiple accounts to gain referral credit, by users who just created new accounts after being banned, and by users who created multiple accounts to game the rating system. Now, Qassia charges users a one-time fee of $5USD to sign up for an account there. 

While it is no longer free to sign up for a Qassia account, I believe that Qassia will still prove to be a useful resource for a webmaster or writer looking to promote his or her work via backlinks.  For those of you who are interested, why not check out Qassia.