Writer Mills Making Money on Articles

I've gone on at length about the money that Demand Studios has made off paying writers a pittance. But payment gets far worse at some of the other mills. However, it doesn't mean that those companies aren't getting an astounding mark-up from their customers.

Let's start with Helium.com. As I've noted, if you crunch through the numbers they've made public, the average article makes 80 cents. (Ironically, while searching I found a piece I wrote about the company back in 2007 when it introduced its "Marketplace," with writers setting prices from $20 to $200 and Helium taking a 20 percent commission for the massive undertaking of listing the piece.)

But have you ever wondered how much Helium charges for what you write? I did a little snooping and got a price list directly from the company itself. It still has the Marketplace, only the customer sets the price and lets writers compete for the job. Great, eh? But the real eye-opener is for that stock content it offers. Purchase fewer than 25 articles and you're paying ... $30 each. Up the volume to between 25 and 49 and it's $25 each. That's every time the article sells. Quite the mark-up.

It's not the only case of a writer mill charging vastly more for content than it pays. Look at AssociatedContent.com. A typical online advertising CPM, or cost per thousand page views, is $10. If the ads delivered with an article get 5,000 views, that's $50 in revenue at a conservative estimate. How much does the writer get paid? Between $1.50 and $2.50. For 50,000 page views, or $500 in revenue, the payment to the writer is between $75 and $100. Let me tell you from experience in blogging commercially: the chance of getting 50,000 hits on a collection of articles even over the period of a month is pretty flipping slim unless you have many up. (By the way, since 2006, AssociatedContent has racked up about $21.4 million in VC money. It claims such clients as Autobytel.com, IAC, Mojo, and GoDaddy.com. The CEO was formerly chief marketing officer at CBS Interactive and, before that, was at Google for four years.)

I don't have the numbers on the flat fees that AC may pay, but I do on Delegate2, otherwise known as PureContent.com, which is the firm that shows up when searching for the former name on Google. You may remember my reporting that the company offered $3 for a "simple" 250 word article. What do they get for the short simple articles from their clients? According to a price list from the company, that would be $16. And for a more complicated article that has writers spending "extra hours researching your subject"? Try $50 for the same 250 word article. So what are they paying the writer? $10? For hours of research?

These mark-ups of 500 percent are large and show how much the writer mills depend on authors opting for orts. There's a reason I refer to this as piecework or a company store. Let's use one more term: sucker bait. They're looking for people who don't realize how much more money work can provide.