What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines | Hacker News Reader

What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines

hopesandfears.com

58 pointsnols26 comments

I haven't done it in a long time (thank heavens), but I used to write a lot of garbage as a way to afford vagabonding around China and generally avoiding real life. I would get paid $10 for 500 words of utter garbage, mostly for SEO purposes. It could be about almost anything, it just had to be well-written (no grammar errors), include a smattering of keywords in very specific locations, and had to meet a length requirement.

Eventually I started outsourcing my writing to stay-at-home moms with English degrees and one of my friends who would trip on acid and pound out three articles an hour.

On the surface it was good money; writing comes naturally to me and I could easily make $30/hour, which was good money for someone sitting on a train in China. But eventually it starts to wear on you. Especially knowing that you're not providing any real value and your entire purpose is basically to trick an algorithm, it just burns you out very quickly.

It's still not ideal for quality content, but at least now the algorithm we're all trying to trick is a mostly human one. I hate Buzzfeed clickbait as much as the next person, but it's still better than filling up the Internet with endless spam.

Not adding value definitely wears on me too.

In the early years of my site, I would have people submit photos of offices to be published and then I'd riff on them for a few hundred words and add a title of "X Company's Amazing NYC Offices".

It all started sounding the same after hundreds of posts so I began requiring the architects to submit a brief explaining the project and found that what they wrote was 1000% more valuable that anything I could write. Post titles changed from being clickbaity fluff to 'Company Name - Location'. Instead of the actual content portion being the value I'm trying to add personally, my goal has been to have the value be in my curation skills.

Now that I've been at it for a long time, I can add value in other ways like adding new tools for readers to interact with the content as well as writing high-level trend pieces on what I'm seeing in the industry.

Your site is quite interesting. I don't understand one thing though - don't you need permission to post photos of someone's office?

The photos are taken by the architect or designer who have permission to share/publish them. They are oftwn taken after the construction is completed and before the company moves in fully.

That said there are many office design projects which are not allowed to be published and are photographed for internal use only.

Just like the ecosystem and the economy and any other system, it's all about feedback loops.

Unfortunately the web today is dominated by a very sick feedback loop driven by perverse incentives. You were being paid to write garbage. You and whoever paid you profited by that. Clearly the incentives are wrong and the invisible hand of the free market is no where to be seen. Why? Because the free market works when consumers are the customers. Not when we are the product.

This isn't unique to the internet. Reality TV, radio soaps, and other fluff content are all created to fill voids in the entertainment space and garner eyeballs. The difference is that the internet is almost infinitely scalable, and there is much more space to fill. Walled gardens, powerful search algorithms, aggregators, and other tools spring up to help consumers sort through the noise.

Not to pry, but how did you get into it? Where does one start?

I'd like to do something like that for some time.

I started out playing with eBay searches to be able to flip stuff (made really, really good money). That turned into SEO, but I didn't want to do "full stack" SEO and thought I wanted to be a writer. I'm not sure it's around or necessary anymore; Google is a little bit smarter. Now it's more manipulating social or creating linkbait.

I 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.

Your comment highlights the shift in perception of search engines between around a decade ago and now. In the past "search" was something people did, while search engine was a tool that helped them. Right now "search" is something Google does. Human, on the other hand, are seen more like a passive recipients of information.

My point is, Google's algorithms do not need to tell the difference between good and bad articles. They need to give users tools for effectively filtering out the garbage they don't want to see. As far as I can tell, Google does not even try to provide that. Instead, they have a mysterious algorithm that's supposed to feed you the "right" results if if it knows who you are.

>Google's algorithms do not need to tell the difference between good and bad articles

But this is not happening. In Most of the cases, Google cannot distinguish between good and bad content and they are ranking the results using their mysterious algorithm. They are still using Backlinks to rank a content and it is wrong.

I 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.

The 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.

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Thank you

Who 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.)

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.

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

That's it. HN is dead. I am glad to see most of those went away without comment, but am shocked to see so many be picked up.

Great find with plain evidence. Does HN have an official stance on promotional accounts? (Paging dang?)

Anecdotal experience makes me think this is a problem on any submission-driven site.

Companies are using this content-mill fluff is to keep their blog alive.

See this example:

main website is

http://www.livinginchico.com/

Their blog: http://blog.livinginchico.com

This is unnecessary requirement enforced by Google on all these small shops. By keeping their Blog active they will maintain their ranking in Google.

Now see this blog post http://blog.livinginchico.com/blog/have-a-stress-free-thanks...

Now you will notice one thing, there are couple of outgoing links in the content:

"other dishes" going out to http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/recipe-collections-fa...

"Check this one out here!" going out to http://www.cozi.com/live-simply/complete-plan-thanksgiving-d...

These are called backlink. This way realsimple.com and cozi.com will keep their raking up in the Google ranking.

So these days when you search in Google you click around from one content-mill fluff to another content-mill fluff. Google has been hijacked by these content-mills.

I am frustrated by this crap.

So after these so called content writers are done with this useless fluff. Someone in Demand Media will insert realsimple and cozi links into the article and post it on main website. The main purpose of this is to bring Cozi and Realsimple raking up in Google.

Search for "Make-Ahead Thanksgiving Recipes" in Google and enjoy the results. https://www.google.com/search?q=Make-Ahead+Thanksgiving+Reci...

They too are looking for more writers - https://twitter.com/hopesandfearshq/status/58510384519119667...

I 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.

Is it just me or did anyone else feeling fed up with this huge waste of resource and time (both the writers and the readers' time).

Anyone interested in looking for a different model?

yes. email me.

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