I haven't done it in a long time (thank heavens), but I used to write a lot of garbage as a way to afford vagabonding around China and generally avoiding real life. I would get paid $10 for 500 words of utter garbage, mostly for SEO purposes. It could be about almost anything, it just had to be well-written (no grammar errors), include a smattering of keywords in very specific locations, and had to meet a length requirement.<p>Eventually I started outsourcing my writing to stay-at-home moms with English degrees and one of my friends who would trip on acid and pound out three articles an hour.<p>On the surface it was good money; writing comes naturally to me and I could easily make $30/hour, which was good money for someone sitting on a train in China. But eventually it starts to wear on you. Especially knowing that you're not providing any real value and your entire purpose is basically to trick an algorithm, it just burns you out very quickly.<p>It's still not ideal for quality content, but at least now the algorithm we're all trying to trick is a mostly human one. I hate Buzzfeed clickbait as much as the next person, but it's still better than filling up the Internet with endless spam.
I think it's sad that so much of this is driven by SEO -- a desire to satisfy an algorithm -- rather than to make good quality human readable content in its own right. In a desire to get on the front page of Google so much useless content is being created, and the content itself is tainted by the inclusion of keywords. This is because, as the article mentions, Google's algorithm can't tell a quality article from one that isn't.
I don't know about the writer in the Philippines, however I was in a similar situation as the writer in Brooklyn earlier this year when I signed on with a content provider while I was in between gigs (not the same one that the writer in the article works for).<p>After submitting my initial writing sample, I was given a writer grade (from 1-5, with 1 being too horrible to get any work and 5 being perfect). Your writer grade influenced what open gigs you could accept- higher number gigs were more technical, wanted better writing, and were more long-form. You could pick from gigs in an open marketplace setting, and gigs varied wildly. Some companies were obviously trying to set up a website for SEO bait with gigs rated at a 2 posting for thousands and thousands of 100-word blurbs with a different topic per blurb, typically paying about $.50 or less per blurb. Other companies actually wanted content like blog posts or a re-write of info that's already on the company website. Frequently writers using the service would set up relationships with clients directly instead of going through the marketplace, and there was a handful in the short time I was there who accepted gigs writing 100K-300K long form pieces for companies (technical manuals, training manuals, documentation, etc.)<p>While there are definitely content farmers utilizing writing services such as the one that I worked for and the one mentioned in the article, it can also be a great way to contract out content creation for new companies or getting someone to re-write and update existing content. It's a lot easier and cheaper to go through a writing company to get a copywriter for a temp gig than it is to go out and hire one, or even go to a regular temp agency since good writing is such a specialized skill.
The final quote is the most interesting:<p>In reference to not getting paid for job, "A lot of these 'scammers' are actually other freelancers who are delegating their own projects in order to get paid for it without having to do any of the work."
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Who reads all this content-mill fluff?<p>I regularly write for trade journals in the legal field and cannot conceive churning out worthwhile articles in less than a day, much less hours. Is it all clickbait junk? How many of the articles here on HN come from such mills?
They too are looking for more writers - <a href="https://twitter.com/hopesandfearshq/status/585103845191196672" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/hopesandfearshq/status/58510384519119667...</a>
I found it interesting that the sort of golden rule of freelancing was in play even for a content farm writer in the Philippines: charging higher rates results in steadier jobs.
Is it just me or did anyone else feeling fed up with this huge waste of resource and time (both the writers and the readers' time).<p>Anyone interested in looking for a different model?