Associated Content is getting more and more prickish regarding articles

I've always completely made up the articles myself, or in the case of fresh news items, rewrote things myself entirely by hand, and I mean COMPLETE rewrites, not just changing a word here and there.

Today I got a note back that a news item i published yesterday (display only due to timeliness) has been declined because portions of it appeared in another article. Portions definitely did not appear in another article, because I was extra careful not to plagiarize.

It seems like whoever has power over my articles there has been more and more picky about things, to the point of being ridiculous, even though i'm writing legit stuff. Not liking it.

Did you rewrite pre-existing articles?

And if you did, did you check them in copyscape?

That's strange they would decline it when it's for display only. Did you rework it at all and resubmit?

AC just likes to screw with people sometimes i feel like

yeah they are it took them about two weeks to offer me 2.30 cents for an article

I have noticed that they usually published around 1,800 - 2,000 articles daily not long ago. But now I can see that these numbers have declined to around 800+ to 1,200+ daily.

I used Google to check these findings. These could well explain their unfortunate change of approach to ALL newcomers, as well as some old timers too.

Its probably the recession id assume.

If they're business is down, i don't see a reason for them to pay you higher.

At 1,000+ articles published daily, even with the recession on and payment stinking, even a 1,000 less than normal, AC must be making good money for themselves. They have a monopoly on this particular business and not anyone coming closer to their domination. Only if there were more such sites paying the writers promptly, then they wouldn't dare these sh**ty tactics...