I don't condemn content mills or the writers who write for them. In fact, as I've stated before on this blog, I think there is some merit to them. They offer writers a way to make quick cash and polish their writing. They teach writers valuable skills like sticking to a word count, writing to a deadline, following guidelines, using SEO and keywords in their writing, and working with an editor.
It's also a nice way to pick up some clips and credibility when you are just starting out.
At the same time, writers need to be extremely careful when it comes to writing for content mills as there are also a lot of negatives involved.
The revenue system is sketchy. There's a lot of fine print that the content mills make almost impossible to find, but pull out to stab the writer in the back later on down the road.
Much of the writing produced by content mills is extremely unprofessional and many editors, publishers and agents won't take you seriously if they find out you write for content mills.
There are also a lot of "as long ases" involved.
Content mills are great for making money "as long as" they don't sell the site to another company that will change the payment policy, guidelines, or decide to cut back on writers.
Your articles will continue to make you money "as long as" the content mill doesn't decide to take you article(s) off the site or change it's revenue or payment policies.
The other thing is that the payout is often only a small fraction of minimum wage. When you consider the hours that go into researching, writing and editing the article and then the time that goes into promotion, you've done far more work than you're actually getting paid for.
But writers get sucked into the content mills, making mere pennies per article and think that this is as high as they can reach. The big paying glossies and trade magazines, the small business clients and high paying blogging gigs are for the big time writers.
Truth is, many of the content mill writers are actually just as good as, if not better than the top earning freelancers. The difference is that the top earners didn't let themselves get sucked into the content mills.
Rather than writing $15 articles on watching paint dry, they sent out pitches and queries to national and trade magazines. They proposed columns and article ideas to the local newspaper. They entered writing contests and sent their manuscripts out to agents, and cold-called companies about hiring them as a writer. They searched the job boards for ghost writing, blogging, editing, and freelancing gigs.
And they got results.
When I was "accepted" to write for Demand Studios and Examiner.com, I was elated. I was going to be paid for my writing which meant that I had made the "big time."
I took my initial assignments for both sites very seriously and spent quite a lot of time researching, interviewing, writing, editing and proofreading. Then I tweeted the articles, shared them on Facebook and LinkedIn, emailed the links to friends and family and blogged about it.
While I was guaranteed $15 per Demand Studios article, Examiner.com proved to be much less "profitable."
I joined the site as the Netherlands Travel Examiner two years ago. In that time, I've written and promoted 26 articles. And earned $36.
Now, I say earned, because although I've earned the money, I have yet to have seen a penny of it. Which brings us back to the danger of "as long as."
The way Examiner.com works is that you earn $0.01 for every "hit" your article gets. Your earnings can increase depending on how long visitors stay on each page, any comments left, advertisements clicked on, and how many times the article is shared via social networking sites.
What's interesting is that, if you refer to your stats (which keep track of how many hits your pages have gotten and how much money you've earned), you'll find that the earnings are quite a bit less than $0.01 per hit.
When I first signed up for Examiner.com, the policy was that writers would get paid on the 20th of the month, but only after they had accumulated $20 on their articles. It took me a year-and-a-half and 22 articles to earn $20.
At the same time I hit the $20 marker, Examiner.com changed it's payment policy. Now, writers would only be paid if they accumulated $25 in one month. So, in order to get my $20, I would have to make an additional $25 on my articles in a month's time. My articles were only making a little over $1 per month. In order to get that many hits, I would have to write over 500 articles.
My assumption is (and you know what they say happens when you assume...) that complaints arose from the Examiner.com community after this change was made. Because less than a month later, the policy was changed again.
This time, writers would have to earn $10 per month in order to see a payout. On top of that, you also have to produce at least one new article each month in order to get paid.
That still means I would have to have over 200 articles in my Examiner.com stable in order to earn $10 a month. As it was, with my 22 articles (assuming it took me one hour to research, write, proof and promote each one - which is, I think, a bit generous), I had made an average of $0.90 per hour.
Then it hit me. There was no reason I should be making less than $1 per hour when other freelancers were making $100 or more per hour.
If I had sold those same articles to travel magazines at a low price of $50 per article, I would have made $1,100. And I wouldn't have had to promote them. In fact, I probably would have gotten a free copy of the publication they appeared in. I'd also have made connections with the editors at those publications, which could have brought me even more work in the future.
And that's just at $50 per article. Imagine if I sold each one of those 22 articles for $100? Or $200? Even if I'd written the articles for Demand Studios at $15 apiece, my earnings would have been $330. Not as attractive a total, but still a far cry from $22.
The sad thing is, I'm not the only one who fell into the Examiner.com trap. Examiner.com "employs" hundreds of writers who punch out 22 articles in the span of a week or a month. Some Examiners have contributed hundreds and hundreds of articles to the site.
Yes, some of these writers make hundreds of dollars each month on articles they wrote long ago, but they still have to produce one new article each month and ensure they get enough hits in order to see that money.
And they have to hope that Examiner.com doesn't decide to delete their content, or go out of business, or sell the site to another company, or change the payment policy again, or change the guidelines so that their previous articles are no longer up to standard, or decide to downsize.
I for one, am eager to leave Examiner.com behind. To delete all my content and rework it to be sold to other, better paying venues. To warn other writers about Examiner.com and content mills like it who take advantage of their writers. It's just a shame that I'll never see that money I earned.
If you'd like to help me earn $10 for the month of October so I can get my money before ditching Examiner.com, here's what you can do:
- Click on the links below to visit all 26 of my Examiner.com articles. Feel free to read them if you'd like, but simply opening the links and leaving them open for a few minutes while you do something else is sufficient.
- Pass along any articles of interest to friends and family or share them via your social networks. Stumble Upon, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+. Sharing the articles with your networks will help spread the word around, make more people aware of the Examiner.com scam and get the links in front of more eyes.
- Feel free to click on the advertisements on the pages of my articles. You don't have to buy anything, but Examiner.com does "reward" its writers for ads that are clicked on. The "rewards" are even greater if an actual purchase is made, so I won't stop you if you do decide to made a purchase via one of the ads. However, I am not asking you to do so, nor do I recommend it.
- Leave a comment. You can do this via Facebook or the Examiner.com comment field. The "rewards" are higher if the Examiner.com comment box is used.
I have until October 20th to accumulate a total of $10 in order to be paid. I will come back each day until then to leave updates. After October 20th, the italics portion of this post will be deleted.
Thank you so much for your help and support.
Image: Illustir, Flickr
© 2011 Tiffany Jansen, writer
