Wake up writers, or we’re all through.
Content mills and farms are slave ships … highly profitable slave ships. They profit from the labors of inexperienced or desperate people who would like to think they’re getting paid to write, but are really only providing grist for the mills.
Mills provide their clients what they want or need, at standard prices, while paying writers peanuts – literally. Even though they may sell the articles for 10-20 times what they pay their poor writers.
The content mills typically pay a writer just $10-15 for 1500-2500 words. (1500 words is five to seven pages, depending on fonts and margins, and will take hours to write.)
Mills are bad enough. What’s much, much worse for writers are the “pay by the click” sites, such as examiner.com (… which just happens to be owned by one of the wealthiest, and most conservative people in the U.S. … that slave ship owner mentality at work).
The poor, gullible writers who produce anything for “by the click” sites are lucky to earn $15 per month – again, literally, not figuratively.
So it’s good to see more and more writers posting about their discontent with content mills and farms. It’s about time.
Take a look at “I Am A Fugitive From A Content Mill.” The author acknowledges the one and only benefit (since there is no financial one) was learning how to write much faster and for longer periods of time.
(That article reminded of an artist I knew – he was part of a crew painting the same pictures, over and over again, for about $10-15 per painting. His boss sold each copy as an “original painting.” Now China does it cheaper.)
This is why so much content is so bad.
Content mills and farms are part of the dark underbelly of the Internet. They prey on young, hopeful or naive writers who think they’ve hit the jackpot when they get to “write for pay.” But writing “content” neither really pays, nor does it really make you a writer.
Nearly none of what we see online is edited or curated. It’s simply posted. (Hence, all the grammatical and punctuation errors.)
But a great many poor sods think getting paid to write content actually makes them “professional writers.” Sad to say, content has nothing to do with authorship.
As soon as content writers see how little they’re actually earning, they realize they need to produce posts as quickly as possible. That inevitably means copying someone else’s online material and doing mash-ups. That’s why there’s so much redundancy online.
Worse still, the big mills and farms actually use “content scrapers” which literally suck up content in order to repurpose it.
(Are you using copyscape.com or blasty.co or a similar site to protect your content?)
“Content” has been big business since the early days of the Internet when there was an explosion of sites whose owners were desperate for clicks. However, the global nature of the Internet meant that anyone, anywhere could bid on the writing jobs. Bidders from around the world (most of whom barely have a command of English) became competitors to domestic writers, gladly taking the relative “peanuts” for pay.
The other side of that coin is clients who care more about low cost than quality – they are enablers. They want to fill up their pages for as little as possible. They get what they pay for.
Dummies. Poor pay guarantees poor content.
Content mills and farms (oDesk, Demand Media, guru.com, Elance, etc.) actually stockpile “articles.” When threadbare sites or publications go shopping for content, the mills and farms offer “off-the-rack” content, which allows them to underbid actual writers.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The mills are treating written work just like stock photography. (And you do know what stock photography did to professional photography, don’t you?)
Prior to content mills and farms, professional writers earned $1-2 per word for magazine articles. (Per word.) A 1,500-word article could mean $3,000 … and an o.k. income if you could sell 10-20 of them per year. (Not so easy to do, then. Impossible today.)
Any writer worth a damn will spend at least four hours on a 1,500-word article. At $10-15 per article, that’s barely $2.50 to $3.75 per hour. And that’s why the quality of much of what we see online is deplorable.
Apart from dumping bad writing online, content mills have also significantly downgraded the relevance and value of the Internet itself.
We, the writers, let that happen by accepting slave wages and turning in work that’s the opposite of “crafted.”
You may have noticed: people are already pretty much fed up with being fed garbage rather than quality writing.
There’s a sucker writing every minute.
So, how can writers survive working for the mills? We can’t. And that’s my point. The mills don’t actually care about writers because quality has nothing to do with what they’re after. They only care about selling content, whatever it is.
All kinds of sites and publications buy that stuff just so that you and I might be attracted to visit … and just possibly click on the ads there …
Where might you have read some of this paltry-paying stuff? Demand Media (one of the giant mills) lists eHow.com, LIVESTRONG.com, Cracked.com, Trails.com, Golflink.com, Answerbag, Mobile, and Impact Stories as some of their content clients.
And here’s what Associated Content (now Yahoo! Voices) said about how they pay their contributors: “You earn money for every one thousand page views your content generates (PPM™ rate). The baseline PPM™ rate is currently $1.50 – meaning if you generate 30,000 page views, you’re paid $45.00 in Performance Payments.”
What does that mean? You only get paid if you drive the masses to click on your articles, 30,000 times. So you’re not only paid peanuts for your work, you have to spam us to get paid the peanuts. You have officially become a click-bait author.
Here’s how former Slate technical writer Farhad Manjoo summed his criticism: “Associated Content stands as a cautionary tale for anyone looking to do news by the numbers. It is a wasteland of bad writing, uninformed commentary, and the sort of comically dull recitation of the news you’d get from a second grader.”
Scott Rosenberg (like Jaron Lanier) criticized Associated Content, and similar companies, for publishing content that’s not even aimed at human readers, but rather for influencing search engines (the SEO trap), thus degrading Google search results.
What does this mean for you and me? The quality of online content is rapidly and clearly declining. But, no doubt, you’ve noticed that.
Content mills encourage plagiarism.
Jaron Lanier wrote about this very thing in his book, “You Are Not a Gadget.” He sees similar ills in the rise of aggregation of data with total disregard for the human element. In other words, many of the factors driving the growth of the Internet are not based on what you and I really want. They’re on based click-bait. Period.
If professional writing was like other trades – teachers, police, electricians, carpenters, firefighters and so on – we’d be talking to each other, getting angry and organizing.
But our trade is not like other trades. We work solo, and some of us truly hit the wall looking for work. The writers who have reached that level of desperation are the ones who bow down to the demon and start writing for the mills.
None who do like it. But they think they must.
If you are a client, the problem for you is that you are very likely promoting plagiarism by using the cheapest possible provider. If you’re paying someone who is providing you with plagiarized or mashed-up content, there could be business consequences. At the very least, your content won’t really work, so your site won’t do you much good.
At the worst, your content could be taken down by digital rights organizations.
Could you survive on $2 per hour?
Third-world pay can only produce very poor results on first-world Web sites. The drivel we are subjected to in poor-quality links has been written by poor sods who haven’t yet realized that, shortly, they won’t be able to pay their rent … or buy food.
If you’re one of those who decides to write for the dark side, you’ll soon notice that your competition on those content mill and farm sites are “content & SEO” providers in the far east, middle east and Africa. That’s when the penny drops. No one in any Western economy can survive on $2 per hour.
Sadly, if you’re only being paid $1-2 per hour, it’s far easier (or necessary) to rip off what’s already online rather than do your own research, writing and editing.
Content farms clearly don’t care. (They care more about keeping shareholders and CEOs happy.)
But you should care. Our online existence has become a double-edged sword. We have virtually unlimited access to “information,” but also enormous responsibility to not spread half-truths and full-out lies.
And, by the way, we also have to be even more diligent about grammar, spelling and punctuation, because the mis-use of language is rampant. (Again, thanks to content mills and farms.)
Eventually, when writers realize they’ll make more money working at Walmart than slaving away for content mills and farms, they’ll stop feeding the ogres. But it will be a while before the mills go hungry since they’re now provided fodder from every corner of the world.
Caveat emptor, my friends, caveat emptor.
