Helium.com changes

The Helium website has caused a huge commotion amongst its writers. They have just introduced an outline of the new rules which they are bringing out. Their message board is going crazy with screams of YAY's and NAY's...mostly nays and lots of questions. The new rules go into effect on Dec. 6th 2010 and will definitely bring about a HUGE change.
Here is a post as it appears on Helium's Blog:
"As you may have seen on our board post, Helium.com will be switching to a new upfront program, effective Monday, Dec. 6.  While the existing program has performed well and accomplished many of the goals we had set for it here at Helium, we believe there is always room for improvement, which the new program promises to address.

Our previous program encouraged our members to write articles in areas in which they were knowledgeable, giving us an extensive breadth of content; however, we recognized that we were missing content in some very important areas. We call these content gaps. By analyzing the current content on our site along with the content we are striving to provide, we are able to create quality titles that fill our content gaps making Helium a stronger and more encompassing information website.

Behind the scenes we focused on obtaining information about the areas of content that are highly searched on the Internet. We used this valuable information to craft titles from an SEO standpoint that we are confident will perform well for our writers. The new payment system allows members to earn more each month by offering higher payments for selected articles.

Another benefit of the new program is that we can now offer upfront payments for articles in any channel, which we were unable to do in the previous program.

Overall, these upfront changes will help guide our writers to write to titles that will earn more over the long-term and help the site prosper, making all stakeholders (that’s you!) more successful.

If you’re interested in finding out the details of our upfront change, please visit ourlatest post in the boards on Helium.com."

What are your thoughts on the changes? If you are a Helium writer will you keep writing? Potential new writers is this good or does it put you off?