“It’s like working at McDonald’s, but for writers.”
That quote comes from a recent Los Angeles Times article. The writer is talking about working for Demand Studios. She equates it with flipping burgers—but the strange thing is, she goes on to defend the practice.
Demand Studios is one of the most prominent of the so-called content farms or content mills (I like the Blakean overtones in that term) that have been attracting a lot of attention among freelance writers. In a tough market for writers, these sites are actually advertising a need for content.
Demand’s massive output feeds content-hungry sites like eHow and Livestrong. Other content mills include Examiner, Suite101, and Associated Content. Some pay by the degree of traffic your articles generate, or clicks on sponsored links that appear beside or in your articles. Others pay a (very small) flat fee per article.
In the Demand model, according to the LATimes writer (she’s a freelance contributor, not a staffer), “A mysterious digital algorithm spits out a constant flow of story ideas in a variety of categories. As a writer, I claim the ones I want, then I get to work. The pieces are short, 400 words or so.” She goes on to mention a fee of $15 and a kill fee of $3.75.
Fifteen dollars for 400 words? Come on. That’s offensive to me both as a writer and a reader.
Let’s look at it from both perspectives.
How am I as a writer supposed to make a living writing 400-word stories for $15?
A decent informative article, no matter how short, requires at least one interview and some background research unless it’s a topic to which you bring your own expertise. Even then, most writers need to investigate the latest information and cite expert opinion to bolster the article.
An earnest writer should take at least an hour researching even the simplest of topics for a 400-word story. Unless, of course, that writer simply regurgitates stuff that’s already on the Internet. Even that takes time. Then comes organizing, honing a lede, writing a draft, self-editing, revising, and then jumping through whatever editorial hoops the content mill requires. Another hour? If you’re fast.
Speaking of editorial hoops, every article for Demand is written on spec, according to the LATimes writer. “They’re returned for rewrites and rejected all the time,” she says, and all that back-and-forthing is by way of an anonymous copy editor-cum-gatekeeper.
Now, if that anonymous copy editor deems that you have made a good-faith effort to revise your story to their specifications, you MIGHT get a kill fee that amounts to a whopping 15% of the original fee. (This according to Demand’s terms of service.) That’s $2.25 for that 400-word, $15 article—and you might not get even that.
Still, the LATimes/Demand Studios writer says that “writing DS articles is weirdly addictive.”
Yeah, if you’re addicted to poverty.
Okay, I can imagine that writing for Demand could be addictive if you don’t rely at all on writing as a source of income. Then it’s probably kind of fun to troll through article ideas and grab one for yourself. No need to research and craft a story pitch. Built-in buyer for your work.
And I readily admit that sites like Demand form a market for writing that didn’t exist a few years ago. They clearly work for some writers; witness their vast amount of content. Part-time writers, stay-at-home moms, even laid-off journalists make Demand work for them to varying extents. But that raises another question:
How am I to trust the information in an article that paid its author fifteen crummy bucks?
Did this writer interview experts, conduct background research? Did an editor challenge the writer to back up assertions, provide source material and fact-checking sources? Did the editor challenge the writer to meet basic journalistic standards of clarity, engagement, and accuracy? Or were satisfying the demands of those ominous-sounding “algorithms” more the editor’s concerns?
Is a writer staking his or her reputation on the timeliness and accuracy of his or her content?
I spent a few hours scrolling through eHow and Livestrong copy and found the quality to vary widely. Some of it appears to be written by genuine experts. A lot of it cites other websites as sources, which means you as a reader are getting exactly the same stuff you could Google and find yourself. In other words, you’re reading a vast recycling bin of already published content. A lot of it is either earnest but worthless (like a featured story on how to become a better baseball player that suggests that you should practice), or so jammed with SEO-friendly keywords that the story is unreadable. Some of the stories aren’t even bylined (e.g., “By an eHow Contributor”), but they link conveniently to someone’s blog, which perhaps suggests one reason to contribute to a content mill: self-promotion.
I’ll be writing more posts about content mills, and I’m going to check in with a writer friend who’s been dipping her toes in the Demand Studios pond. For now, I’ll say that as reader or writer, it’s buyer beware.
I mean, even a writer who’s addicted to Demand says it’s like working at McDonald’s.
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