New Writing Site

I just signed up for a new writing site called Wizzley. It is very similar to HubPages but allows more affiliates. I hadn't used my Allposters account for a while and now I can add it to my articles.

I copied an article there that I already had on HubPages. It's more a personal article so didn't really belong on HubPages any longer. It's called Living with Grandma in Glasgow, Scotland.

I see a lot of friends from HubPages there and I'm sure there will be a lot more joining. It does allow Adsense, you start getting a 50/50 share but that goes up after you publish a few articles. The links are also no-follow until you have published at least 5 articles. That should cut down on spammers a bit.

The Freelancer and the Corporate Model

I started to write for web clients in late 2007. At first, most of my clients were smal-time entrepreneurs--individual people just like me who were trying to earn a living by setting up websites and selling products on them or generating ad clicks.

I wrote articles and product descriptions for these folks, wrote landing page copy, 'About Us' copy, and all sorts of other short content pieces for actual  human beings from all over the globe. It wasn't a great way to get rich, but it was interesting work and I met a lot of interesting people doing it. And it did pay the bills, which was very nice indeed.

I also joined a couple of revenue sharing sites when I first started writing online. In the beginning my intent was just to showcase my work so I could refer potential clients to it, and possibly even get new clients in the process. That worked out well, and after a year or so it became clear that ad revenue was a real possibility at some of these sites too, so I began to take that more seriously.

The web has changed a lot since 2007 though.

The first change is that private clients are  harder to get now and many of them are struggling. Secondly, the number of revenue sharing sites has mushroomed. (I currently belong to six or seven of them.) Earning actual money through revenue sharing has gotten a lot more difficult and most people now use these venues for social networking or to drive traffic to blogs or to their own personal web sites.

Google and other search engines are much more focused on finding a way to separate crappy content from good content and advertisers are not spending what they once did. The brief window of opportunity that allowed revenue sharing sites to profit by consolidating uncollected pennies from gazillions of amateur Internet writers is starting to close. 

Enter corporate content providers like Demand Services and Break Studios who apply the corporate model to distill what is most salable from web content, buy it from freelancers at a low but still competitive rate, and then sell it at as large a profit as possible to quality sites.

The involvement of corporate 'content farms' in recruiting web freelancers has already produced its first revenue sharing casualty: E-How.

E-How now only accepts content through Demand Studios. So, if you want to write for E-How, you have to apply to Demand Studios, be accepted, follow their stringent, productive-as-hell editorial guidelines to the letter, and start pumping the stuff out on their terms at their rates. Lots of people are mad about this, but for now it does have its advantages.

A few of the advantages:

• If you get good at it, you can make a decent hourly wage. At least, for now you can.
• They do pay you. Getting paid is not nothing in the world of online writing.
• The per word rate is about double what you can drum up at the job boards. 
• You can currently work as little or as much as you like. 

A few disadvantages and concerns:

• Most people who get into freelancing are attracted to it because they never want to see another cubicle for as long as they live. This new trend feels a bit like being stalked by the corporate cubicle you just left. (It feels like that because it is that.)
• The relentless focus on productively leaves little room for excellence, in depth analysis, or personal voice. Writing of this sort is always needed, but isn't much fun to read or to produce. 
• The pay is good only if you are used to horrible pay, which most freelancers are. 
• This trend will surely kill off better-paid subcontract work that can sometimes be found by approaching corporate public relations departments directly. Why pay a freelancer thousands of dollars when you can get the work for a fraction of that cost from a content farm?
• Why should corporations ever create new jobs, real jobs, when they can farm out creative projects online for pennies and skip wages, bennies, retirement packages, and the like entirely?

Over the course of the last two years or so the freelance job boards have become the refuge of third world hopefuls who may not even speak English very well let alone write it well, and for sleazy web-preneurs who may or may not actually pay the teeny per word rates they initially promise.

Revenue sharing sites, which used to be kind of fun, now seem to be the disreputable lounge where all of these desperate people hang out and torment each other when no one will pay them five cents to write an article on toe fungus.

Much of the rest of freelance web writing is currently being taken over by corporations. Corporations have learned from watching freelancers that they really don't need employees at all. Temporary work, subcontract work, and freelance work is the only kind of work that is really growing in the United States right now.

It isn't just about freelance writing either. I watch the state employment site in MI and the regular job postings too, and I've noticed that even call center work and billing are now almost entirely run by staffing agencies. No one seems to hire anyone directly anymore for much of anything.

Already jobs that should be compensated as real jobs are being categorized by corporations as subcontract work in order to circumvent labor laws, unemployment insurance, and so forth. It is such a big problem right now and such a major trend that President Obama has gone after it specifically--although, considering the general political tone in the U.S. lately, I'm not expecting much.

Someone asked me just today in a forum if it is still possible to earn a living by freelancing online. The best answer is yes and no. 1) No, not a a very good living and not an easy one. And,  2) yes--and it might just be the only living available pretty soon if current trends continue.

It's ironic that a medium that started out being hailed as the ultimate in grass roots fairness and the province of the small-time entrepreneur is now falling to the same forces that gave the world call centers, cell phone contracts, and credit default swaps.

Think you are freelancing?

Think again.

Maybe you just traded your plasterboard cubicle for a virtual one.

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.