Demand Studios: Pros, Cons, Ruminations

I signed up for Demand Studios near the end of 2009. A friend from Hub Pages sent me the link, and let me know that they do in fact offer some sort of group health plan if you write at least 30 articles per month for them for three months. That didn't sound too bad, so I applied and have written maybe 50 or 60 articles so far.

Demand Studios takes hot search phrases and spins them out as requests for content. You can choose from a number of formats. The shortest articles are 150 words long and pay $7.50 each. The longer ones are around 500 words long and pay $15 each. They also post a limited number of revenue sharing topics for no upfront payment. Those articles provide long term residual income, much like any other revenue sharing site (Hub Pages, Suite 101, Bukisa, Associated Content, etc).

Demand Studios pays every Friday and they do pay reliably. I've never had an issue with payment from them. They provide very specific editorial guidelines, which is helpful but also burdensome in some ways. (You'll see what I mean if you try them out.) In fact, if you decide to write for them, you will definitely spend an hour or two just reviewing the guidelines, and you will definitely spend the first few weeks (even after you start writing) checking the guidelines frequently.

In spite of this, some of your articles will definitely be sent back by the Copy Editors (called CEs in the DS forums) for revision. My most common revisions are always "too long, cut 100 words" but sometimes they'll not like how you phrased this or that. Most corrections can be made quickly and I've never had an article come back more than once. Most go through fine the first time.

DS pays approximately 4 cents per word for the content you write. If you can write one 500 word article per hour or two 150 word articles per hour that means you make about $15 per hour--at least in theory you do. In practice, it's hard to whip out DS articles at that pace.

Why?

First of all, you have to provide four references per article. They can't be Wiki references or commercial site references. Usually what I do is open five tabs right off the bat, line up my references on four of them, and write the articles on the fifth. They provide a template, which is convenient in some ways, but not in others. For instance, there's no word count feature, and the CEs are very very anal about word count. So I keep a Word doc open too so I can count words. That's annoying.

If I really focus, I can pump out two short articles per hour, however, some of them always come back, so there goes my $15 hourly rate. Also, the topics are incredibly technical. Some are so technical you'll be hard pressed to know what they even mean. Some don't mean anything. They tell you this right in the editorial guidelines. Some topics are completely nonsensical and can't be written. If you attempt to write an unwritable article, your CE will send it back with a snotty comment about how you shouldn't have written it and you won't be paid for it. So there's more time you can waste if you are unlucky.

A lot of time is taken up looking for topics that are 1) real, and 2) have adequate references available. So that cuts into your hourly rate too. The topics are difficult. I'm no genius, but I'm not stupid either, and I'd say 70% of these topics I couldn't write with a brain transplant from an atomic engineer. I drift towards medical topics, plants, and animals. Even those are not so easy. If you are a gear head and you can write, this is your Mother Lode for sure. If not, you'll spend a lot of time looking for topics.

In practice, I find that I can only stomach writing five or six of these DS puppies at a sitting before I want to bang my head on the keyboard and cry. So I try to stop before I get to that point. If I actually wrote five or six $7.50 articles each day, I'd have a semi-decent deposit every Friday and I'd qualify for their health insurance in a month or two (I have no idea if it's any good but I'm guessing probably not)... but in practice, I find myself avoiding the site more than I find myself drawn to it.

In short, Demand Studios is more reliable than the job boards but in a lot of ways is every bit as depressing. More so, really. I mean, I have met some nice clients at the job boards--I've met some stinky ones, but the nice ones were really nice. DS on the other hand is very impersonal. No warm fuzzies, no 'great job', nothing all that cool to write there either. Very dry, technical writing and if you hear from DS it's because you screwed up. So that gets discouraging after awhile. It's not glamourous.

More to the point though, it's hard to do that kind of writing for very long without remembering that there are people in the world (or there were) who make very good money for doing the exact same thing--like, between $40K and $60K per year with bennies, and they don't have to be productive every minute of the day or else lose their salaries. So if you think of that, if that ever at any point enters your mind, you will start to not love Demand Studios. You will start to feel like a freaking serf.

So forget I ever brought that up. Just erase that whole thought from your mind. Sorry I said that.

Demand Studios is an opportunity to make some money at home, but it's also a mill. It's been referred to by writers with jobs as a 'content farm'. Some of the places online that buy DS content have lots and lots of money--they're really big names and really high profile, and your content is being sold to them for god knows what while you get peanuts. DS and the sites that buy the content profit, you do not, and there goes that great job you dreamed of as a kid too, writing for a magazine or whatever.

Kiss that goodbye you serf you. And get back to work! (The clock is ticking!)

OK. Will it help you down the line to write this stuff? I can't see how. It does help the people who own Demand Studios and the people who buy the content from them. On the other hand, I see no reason to be ashamed of writing it. I've heard that some writers use pseudonyms at DS because they don't want it known that they're writing this stuff for small dinero or that they need the money. That seems overly sensitive and silly to me.

At some point, people will want to read real writing again. In the meantime, there's the electric bill, you know? I use DS to fill in gaps when I've nothing more interesting to work on or I need to pay a bill. Do I enjoy it? Not really.

In the meantime, at least Demand Studios does pay on time with real money. In the world of online freelancing, that's worth something, even if it IS chump change.

Can You Still Make Money Writing Online?

The shortest possible answer to that question is "no" or "not much," but a better, more accurate answers is, "Yes, but it's a lot of work and you have to constantly change your game, and even then you aren't likely to get rich fast."

I'm going into my third year now of writing online for pay, and for what it's worth, I do have some observations and thoughts about how things are evolving (or devolving). Take them or leave them as you will. They're just my personal opinions, not facts carved in stone:

1) In 2007 when I got my first five bucks from Helium, the prospect of writing for websites and getting paid too was heady stuff and fairly new. That first five bucks beat anything I'd ever made from my publications in literary journals (usually you get paid with copies and bragging rights for that), and I remembered, briefly, how nice it is to get money for doing something you love. Money is not everything, but it isn't nothing, either. Money can be nice. Enough money is very nice. Too much money is lovely. Most of us are happy if we can just scrabble together enough.

2) Since that first five bucks, the net has gotten a lot more crowded with people of all stripes who are trying to wring five bucks out of it, or fifty. I used to get great clients at the job boards (especially at Elance) and for over a year I made money there that was comparable to the salary I'd earn at almost any job I've ever had or am likely to get in the midwest--about $25 per hour if I kept my head down and didn't screw around too much. I made that money by constantly trolling for work, learning the 'red flags' that said 'this client is trouble', exceeding expectations, and handing the work in early so I could get my money and move on to the next thing. I worked fast, with focus.

I also rarely accepted work for which the money wasn't placed in escrow up front (with escrow, the client pays in advance, the payment is held by the job board, and the client releases the payment to you when the work is turned in). But over the past six months or so, as more and more out-of-work people crowd these boards hoping to pick up some much needed cash, the situation has reversed itself.

At this point, I'm finding that the writers at these job boards are often way more professional and respectable than the clients they have to court. You've got people who used to make real money in publishing and journalism trolling for penny-per-word work from people who can barely spell k-a-t and are basically, well, thieves.

These people often screw with you, even when the money is escrowed. They'll post ten articles needed and ask you to rewrite them so they get 30. They'll post per-job work and let you know afterward they want you to write 'x' number of words per five minutes. They'll ask you to write one thing and come back with, "I changed my mind, now do this and this and this." It's not the same as it was when I first started drumming up work there and people were still mostly decent, if you were careful about who you chose.

Many people like to blame India for driving down rates at the job boards. (India gets blamed for everything these days it seems.) But I think the bulk of the blame goes to a new model in which advertising dollars are no longer dependent in any way on quality content--a corporate model in which there is little protection for anyone trying to work, period, let alone work by freelancing, alone. It's kind of like the Wild West out there right now. When I left my day job, everyone was shifting from an hourly wage model to a sort of low-rent 'draw against commission' model, and the bennies were tanking too. I hope this trend won't last, but for now, it's kind of ugly all over.

3) So if you mean to wring money out of these barracudas, you have to always be changing your game. It's good to have half a dozen different venues and work a bit at all of them if you can. Yes, that's exhausting. No it won't make you rich. But I'm not addressing the question, "Can you get rich doing anything online?" I'm addressing the question, "Can you still make money writing online?" You can still make a little money writing online. Not much. You'll have to do lots and lots of work for it. You'll have to put up with lots and lots of abuse sometimes. You will for sure get stiffed more than once.

4) BUT...this too shall pass. Historically speaking, writers as a lot have not been notorious for being consistently overpaid. For every Stephen King raking in millions, there are always 5,000 or more  writers who are just as good but can't get a damned thing in print, never mind make any money off of it.

It has always been thus, and may always be so, but good venues come and go. You can ride this or that wave if you pay attention and are talented and lucky. In Dickens time, good writers could earn a meager living selling serial novels that were printed in tabloids a chapter at a time. In Vonnegut's time, good writers could sell short stories and even sort of pay the bills with what they made selling them. In Normal Mailer's time, writers with agents could write pieces for what was known in the trade as 'the slicks'---magazines that were printed on shiny paper, like Playboy--and they could make a decent living doing so. I personally know a writer who did that. It's much harder to do that now.

The thing to remember here is, all of those venues came and went.

When I was in college, writers paid the rent by writing for "True Confessions" and "True Story" for two cents per word. Now, writers attempt to pay the electric bill, or part of it, by writing for revenue sharing sites and selling their work outright to net-preneurs and PR folks who subcontract some of their work online to freelancers...for about (again) two cents a word. Sometimes "True Confessions" checks came late or not at all. Same with writing online. This will also change, and I think it will change fairly soon, too, because the net is getting pretty saturated at this point with both writers and net entrepreneurs. Every dog has his day. But he's still a dog.

So what can you do to if you are a writer?

Write. Writers write, it's what they do. A dog is a dog and a writer is a writer. It is what it is and what it always has been. Writers write the way walkers walk, plumbers plumb, dancers dance, and so forth. Write about what you care about and write well regardless of what you get. Do the best you can. Never, never take the changing monetary mess out there personally, because it will grind you up and spit you out and then step on you and laugh. Make what you money can, sure, but keep it separate from who you are.

When it comes right down to it, that's all any of us can do, whether we write or don't.