Writer Mill AllVoices.com Answers

The following came in as a comment on my post about AllVoices.com being a writer mill -- that is, wanting writers to provide content for little to no money. But I wanted to address it more directly, as it seems to come from AllVoices.com CEO Amra Tareen:

Erik, you are absolutely right the writers, photographers and citizens that can have their own website, search engine optimize the content, reach a global audience and build a community should develop their own site. As you 80% of blogs out there have an audience of one.

Allvoices is about people reporting news and opinion and discussing it with allvoices diverse community. The site automatically create context around the user reports with images, newsstories links, blogs and videos in real time. plus allvoices has a community from over 167 countries that contributes and share news. We have a recommendation engine that connects people together from all over the world. The program is an incentive not a salary. Also not everyone needs to join the incentive they can write for views, audience and connections.

Let's address the misconceptions and mistakes in this answer. Do most blogs have a small to non-existent audience? Absolutely. Then again, most blog are not intended to be anything more than outlets of self-expression. And when marketing and exposure is the intent, clearly you need to do work to get more of an audience, particularly an audience that can respond in a way that turns into more work. Or you might be looking for an audience, in which case you want to focus on your connection to them as the primary thing, not the connection to some publication or site.

As to the assertion that AllVoices "is about people reporting news and opinion and discussing it with allvoices diverse community," I have two words: horse shit. This is a business being run by a woman who apparently has an MBA from Harvard and was a partner at an early-stage VC fund. She has held multiple positions in high tech management. There are multiple Ph.D.s on the management team.

This is not some altruistic venture, folks. It's a business. So when I heard, "The program is an incentive not a salary," I think, "Sure, you want to pay peanuts to get the content that might give you something to sell." Here's the headline from the page on which the company describes the incentive program: "Build Your Brand. Gain Influence. Make Money." Let's take this in three steps:

1. You don't build your brand. You build their brand. The more content they have, the more they drive appearances in search engines and, ultimately, the more money they make.


2. Gain influence? You have got to be kidding. If I write a piece for the New York Times Magazine I gain some influence -- for that moment. If I write something that hits the front of HuffPo, for heaven's sake, I might get momentary influence. If I write for AllVoice, I get, "Who?"


3. Make money? I thought this was about brand?

According to the site, you can make a whopping 25 cents to $2 per thousand page views, and you only get the upper end if you can achieve a minimum of 100,000 views. If you'll remember a point I've made before, run of site ads are likely paying in the $10 per thousand range. To put that into perspective, I blog on a fairly high profile site, and even after building what I'm doing for well over a year, that's several months of page views for me.

AllVoices had claimed on its site in February that it hit the one million monthly visitor mark. In responding to Angela Hoy, it claimed 2.7 million. Maybe. I checked Alexa.com, got the percentage of global page views and compared it to that of my own domain. Doing the math, it sounds as if the company is maybe 1.5 million page views a month. You always have to take these site estimates with a grain of salt, but it certainly sounds odd compared to the company's claims. It would also mean that they're bringing in maybe $15,000 a month, which is nothing for a company like this. In other words, the chance of making significant income from the venture might as well be zero.

So there's no money and no real branding advantage. To me, that translates into no reason at all to work for yet another writer mill.