Promoting themselves as the complete online publishing service, Triond allows writers looking to monetise their work without all the hassle of building a popular blog.

The deal is simple: you write the content, submit the new work using a fairly uncomplicated submission process, at which point they go off and work out how best to make money from your hard work. Namely publishing your content on the most appropriate websites available in their catalogue.

What’s in it for them? Well, they take 50% of the cut from any profit your content generates.

Ostensibly it appears to be a fair arrangement. After all, they have the audience and connections along with the means to publish anything from photos to compositions. All you have to do – as they so cheerfully exclaim on their “How it works” page – is “Create!”

However, after spending a few hours this morning working on what turned out to be an overlong article entitled “9 Real-life Tips for the First Time Marathon Runner,” some underlying issues surfaced.

The main gripe is quite simple: you have no idea how much your content is going to generate. Of course, you could say the same about blogging and publishing content on your own site as no one is prescient enough to know what’s going to be popular on their site – if anything. For smaller sites with popular content it probably makes sense to publish content through Triond as half of something is worth more than all of nothing. As a site grows and builds up a readership, however – do people really stick with Triond?

Secondly, and this is something I am well aware of, there is a lot of negativity floating around the interwebs in relation these type of aggregate sites. Though a “living” can apparently be eked out from these services (Triond is just one many sites accepting content and promising residual payment through the life-time of your content), there are those that criticise the service for demanding an exorbitant amount of time and effort to perceive any real success.

Ofcourse, the proof is in the pudding and I’m happy/anxious to say that my first submission is now ‘pending’. I’ll be sure to chime back in with an opinion after the piece is published (if it’s published) and how much money it generates. I’m predicting somewhere in the region of 6c.