What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
#2Who reads all this content-mill fluff?
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?
Re: What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
#3The final quote is the most interesting:
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."
Re: What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
#4Who reads all this content-mill fluff? 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?
The market for content has shifted. At one point it was just about writing content for Google because Google doesn't know quality content from bad. This lasted for a really long time, beginning with Adsense about 2003 (because targeted content could bring in CPMs up to $1000) until eHow and the content farms finally began to get beat up in the rankings.
Then, about the same time that started to fade Facebook unleashed a traffic boom from the news feed. Newspapers, blogs, and content sites have benefited immensely from this. In this case it is not so much "clickbait junk" be re-written articles stolen from someone else. Take a look at a news site like the DailyMail, that is what is going on more or less. DailyMail is an interesting example because the content is produced so quickly that it is common for basic mistakes like the people in the photos being mislabeled or a male being referred to as a female and so on. Imagine how accurate the alleged facts are in that type of content!
I suspect the era emerging now is going to become a lot more difficult for both writers and content publishers. Not just because of the eventuality of internet ad revenue growing with the rate of inflation but also the big platforms (Facebook, Google) continuing to plug their leaky boats (which leaked for a very good reason.)
Re: What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
#5Who reads all this content-mill fluff? 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?
The market for content has shifted. At one point it was just about writing content for Google because Google doesn't know quality content from bad. This lasted for a really long time, beginning with Adsense about 2003 (because targeted content could bring in CPMs up to $1000) until eHow and the content farms finally began to get beat up in the rankings. Then, about the same time that started to fade Facebook unleashe…
Maybe then I'm just not seeing the fluff because I don't read those types of sources. I wouldn;t touch anything on facebook. The few blogs I keep track of are thinks like TorrentFreak, Krebs or TechDirt. For world news every morning I read the BBC. I don't see much fluff. Or maybe I'm just blind to it.
Most of the articles I've been paid decent money to produce are now locked behind paywalls, which I ironically cannot afford. Hopefully that means they aren't fluff.
Re: What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
#6I 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.
Re: What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
#7I 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.
Re: What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
#8Who reads all this content-mill fluff? 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?
Almost every startup blog we see on HN is a content farm packed with contrived content targeting this/similar communities and brought to us by accounts that only exist to promote themselves on HN. Some of them are regulars on the front page -
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=githubengineering.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com
etc
Re: What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
#9The final quote is the most interesting: 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."
I see this quite often even with mid-quality content providers.
They're selling content for around £25 - £30 per 500 words but you have no idea who actually wrote it. The results are, at best, bland but otherwise reasonably well written.
Re: What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines
#10I 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).
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.)
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.