This month’s Wired has a great story on the the $1 billion company behind Demand Studios.
It’s fascinating. They’ve developed an algorithm that analyzes data from Google and other sources, spits out topics for “articles” and calculates how much money that content can bring in from ads over its life on the net. Afterward, an assembly line forms, starting with people who refine the algorithm’s titles for 8 cents apiece (“how to cake roses,” for example, becomes “how to make icing roses for a cake”) and feed them into the Demand Studios site. There, “writers” pick topics and fill a template with relevant details for up to $15 per article. An editor reads each piece for $2.50 a pop, and the results power sites like ehow.com, livestrong.com (Lance Armstrong is an investor) and a raft of other content sites. The individual pages generate very small returns, but the sheer volume of words the system creates makes it a profitable and fast-growing endeavor.
Naturally, many people who make their living writing for reputable print and Web publication view this as an affront to the value of their work. Good writing, solid research, integrity and the other traits of a successful freelancer are worth more than 2 cents per word (20 to 50 times more, in fact). That people are willing to devalue their own work to the degree required to work for Demand, Helium.com, Suite101.com, Examiner.com and the like cheapens the craft, many say, and drives down the value of the work done by the professionals.
Yet, I’ve begun to think that the proliferation of writer mills will have a negligible effect on professional freelancing in the long run. Here’s the short of it: Journalism and Web content production aren’t the same thing, and as such they draw from two distinct labor markets. Successful Web content sites require high search engine rankings and volume, as opposed to good writing and original research. Creating that content requires a combination of Web surfing, data entry and the language skills of a native speaker with a high-school degree. In short, it’s unskilled labor. Anyone who speaks English can do it.
Journalism — the hard work of interviewing, researching and writing about what we discover in a way that is fresh and compelling — is different. It’s a profession in the sense that it requires a set of hard-earned skills to do well. A limited number of people have what it takes to write for a magazine, and pay rates will reflect that limited supply.
I imagine many of my colleagues are concerned that hordes of content drones eventually will vie for more high-profile work, ask for only 10 cents per word (a 500 percent raise!) and price the rest of us out of a middle-class living. There are a couple reasons why that’s unlikely. First, it’s pretty damn easy to compete with someone whose best writing sample consists of 600 words entitled “The Best Ways to Reduce Your Dog’s Flatulence” that was researched on Wikipedia and dashed off in 40 minutes. Second, anyone who churns out the volume of stories needed to earn worthwhile money writing for content sites is unlikely to have much time to work on projects that would actually bolster his or her portfolio. Demand recently announced that it will offer access to a health insurance plan to some of its writers. That’s great, but it’s also a cunning way to keep Demand’s top producers writing indefinitely for pennies.
Meanwhile, the number of writers walking the tough road toward a career in real freelance journalism will actually shrink. A smaller number will start out in the church newsletter or a friend’s blog, finagling their byline into tiny publications, then leveraging modest clips with great story ideas to craft portfolios that grow with the writers’ skill, connections and business savvy. Instead, many aspiring freelancers will take the $15, hone their speed-writing skills and trade a hard climb toward professionalism for the instant gratification of a job on the assembly line.
As someone who writes stories that are worth a lot more than $15 to the people who assign them, a market full of unskilled workers spinning their wheels at Demand Studios only makes me look more professional by contrast.
