Article submitted by Schatze Page at http://2bots.net/?p=196 – - –
Forbes magazine has joined the ranks of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) reporting, which means it hires inexperienced, amateur writers to produce 10 to 20 blog rags (i.e., 600 to 800 words of unverified, unedited, unfounded, and unsubstantiated paragraphs of text) a month for less than one penny a word. “Contributors,” Forbes calls them, are required to produce between 4,000 and 16,000 words a month for a pitiful base pay of $50 a week!
SEO writers focus on capturing the attention of search engines by using specific, targeted keywords or keyword phrases to push their amateur blogs to the first page of your search engine results. These Forbes’ bloggers (and that’s a kind definition for what they do) spend more time using Google’s Keyword Tool to ascertain which words will solicit the most user hits, than they do researching and writing these unedited, unsubstantiated blog pieces, which is why they are inundated with grammatical and punctuation errors, in addition to erroneous facts.
And for this very special privilege of spending more than half a month doing minimal Internet research, which means they just repeat and then rewrite what the “real” journalists have investigated through hours of corporate interviews, combing thru company documents, and talking with dozens of professional analysts; these “contributors/bloggers” get a big bonus of $0.005 per page view. Wow!
“But we have bloggers making $9000 a month for producing less than 5000 words a month,” they say; they being these SEO content mill publishers who lure these naïve, amateur bloggers to their nest like a spider lures flies to its web. And more tall tales follow when they prove their claims by publishing a scanned image of an “actual” check for $9000 (a 40 second forgery in Photoshop).
PC World tried this for a while, but they paid $1500 a month, which, for one article a day (or 31 blogs a month) still sucks because that’s only about .06 (six cents) a word. When my roommate worked there, he spent five to six hours a day working on each article because the editor he worked for had no experience or self confidence. When she called him every morning to discuss his topic—which had to be one of the top 10 Google technology news stories of the day—instead of approving his daily topic, she’d whine and cry and complain about all the other freelancers and how none of them listened or respected her. Consequently, it took longer to finish his work, which set his hourly rate at just above minimum wage.
None of the articles were edited for content, grammar, or punctuation and, since a dozen or so writers all had to choose from the same top 10 list, the good topics (which would extract the most hits) were saturated, while the more tiresome topics were ignored. And the plagiarism was horrendous! After all, how many ways can a dozen writers all say that the Apple iPhone launch was a nightmare.
About.com (which is owned by the New York Times) pays around $725 a month (up from $700 a month six years ago), but these folks work like dogs for those table scraps. Bloggers spend 20 to 30 hours a week on blogs, forums, reviews, FAQs, tutorials, tests, graphics, and correspondence with readers. Bloggers are limited to one topic and, sometimes, to one small niche in that topic. I have read hundreds of these About blogs and so, so many of them are oozing with errors and misinformation. About.com is just another carbon copy site that exploits rookies and capitalizes on professional journalists’ work.
Suite101 is even worse. They only pay by page views (although they have recently added a percentage of the AdSense revenues to that). One gentleman I interviewed said he was required to write four feature articles and four blog posts a month. With an average of 15,000 to 20,000 page views a month, he’s lucky to make $1 per article per month. And every day, it gets worse because the pay is so bad, no one stays for more than a few months. High turnover means the word gets around faster and the word is “don’t waste your time with Suite 101 (or About.com).”
Examiner.com and Top Ten Reviews are two more content mills that exploit writers and never fact-check or provide any copyediting. Both pay by page views and, if you fall behind on your quota, which is around three to four articles a week, they withhold your pay (which is pathetic to begin with). I wrote for Examiner.com when it first launched, for about two months. They refused to pay me until I had earned $100, which never happened. After I resigned and asked for my compensation, they refused again saying I forfeited my pay when I quit! So, essentially, these bastards have been making money off my articles for around five years and I have never received a single penny from them.
Examiner.com’s original launch was so huge, every Internet search generated dozens of Examiner hits. It got so bad, that users stormed the Google gates and demanded that Google severely limit the Examiner hits or remove them altogether. Following some shrew negotiating, Google restricted the number of Examiner hits that could appear on any single topic. After that, writers by the thousands quit, and Examiner reverted back to its original form; that is, a pathetic little chameleon who is only capable of imitating its surroundings because it lacks the skills and ability to produce anything original.
AND, Top Ten Reviews DOES NOT review ANY of the products on its website or those mentioned in its articles. This is another company my roommate worked for. Top Ten Review’s product reviews are based on Internet research (which is the work of those few magazines who actually do purchase and test products) or contributions from the manufacturers. That means if Top Ten Reviews prints an article that says RipIt software is better than ZipIt software, which is better than TipIt software; you can only count on one thing as truth, which is: Either one of the legitimate magazines, such as Consumer Reports, listed RipIt as the best product OR RipIt paid Top Ten Reviews to list its product as number one.
This unethical practice is known as a sponsored post; that is, a post on a website or blog that’s paid for by an advertiser. I often wonder how many people purchased products they believed were used and tested by professionals; merchandise that Top Ten Reviews listed as the best or second best product, only to find out later that the product they purchased sucked and Top Ten Reviews lied in order to collect a payoff!
And what about the Huffington Post, which doesn’t pay its contributors anything? Not a single farthing! With revenues in the neighborhood of $30 million last year, revenues generated on about 4.8 billion page views (according to Quantcast data), this publication cannot seem to find even a pitiful wage for its bloggers. WAKE UP bloggers! Stop working for free! If you think these penny-ante jobs are providing exposure and getting your name “out there,” you’re wrong! All the professional publishers (and everyone else in this industry) know how much these content mills pay, which means they know you’ll work for next to nothing. Once you’ve worked for pennies, it’s a lot harder to convince editors that you’re worth more.
In summary: If research or acquiring accurate facts is your goal, DO NOT believe or even read these blog posts disguised as professional journalism submitted by contributors or guest writers at well-known content mill magazines. If we boycott the content mills, maybe these publishers will change their tactics. I remember when a topic such as Celtic heroes actually produced professional (or near professional) websites with accurate, relevant information. Now, this same topic returns forums and blogs written by frustrated housewives, teenagers, and ego-inflated mad men who know NOTHING about Celtic heroes except for what they’ve seen on television!
The Internet is changing. It is becoming one, huge scrapbook for teeny-boppers and stalkers: one to flood the information highway with Facebook-style details about everything from what your BFF had for breakfast to what color her Tuesday under panties are; TO how to find your neighbor’s babysitter, so you can attach a GPS tracking chip to her car bumper so it’s easier to follow her around. As this tabloid-type of Internet swells and swallows up all the legitimate sites; serious, professional users will begin searching for more reliable sources such as Internet2, and that’s when the planet will see another huge divide between the wealthy and the Walmart population. The rich will have access to the real super highway, while the poor are stuck on the misinformation freeway.
And last: Dr. Ian Sussman, Elliott Gould’s character in the film Contagion, said, “Blogging is not writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation!”
For an interesting review of the changing Internet, read this article:
http://observer.com/2013/04/why-sponsored-posts-are-a-waste-of-ad-dollars/
FYI: I am a professional journalist and published author (14 years), and I DO NOT write for any of the content mills. However, this is my website and, although I consider my work editorials, articles, and reviews, which are fact-checked and copyedited, you may disagree. That said, I urge you to research everything you read including all the works on this site.
