The risks of using 3rd party sites
The Internet is always changing. It's important to understand the risks of using only 3rd party sites. When using 3rd party sites, other people (not you) control your pages, you have to follow their rules and are restricted by them. Relying totally on the income from other sites is risky.
Sites can disappear.
Here are some example of sites that disappeared:
- Yahoo Voices and Squidoo closed in 2014.
- Squidoo has been acquired by HubPages and Squidoo pages stopped being visible around September 2014. Some of your content might have been transferred to HubPages and other pages were no longer available online.
Rules can change.
Here's an example of changing rules.
Several years back, HubPages used to allow you to promote Clickbank, Amazon and Adsense and link to your opt-in pages. And then they changed their policies. People who had hundreds of lenses and were making commissions from Clickbank links, opt-in page links and others were taken offline until they removed those links.
Why let someone else have control over your pages?
Why spend a lot of time creating pages on sites you don't have control over?
Why share your income with sites like HubPages?
Hubpages allowed Amazon affiliate links and you could add Amazon products to your hub with your associates tag embedded, but they took part of your earnings by displaying your tag and theirs randomly according to a certain percentage. Wouldn't you rather get all the commissions yourself? You can get them all by putting up your own website or blog.
Don't depend on a third party's terms of service that are always changing. Instead of using 3rd party sites like HubPages or other sites controlled by other people, create your own site(s) where you have full control.
Setting up your own web site or blog is a much safer option than using third-party sites.