Content Mills Don’t Work – Here’s Why

Content mills: the corner of the internet where everyone promises the moon, but most people are in the dark.

Authors are offered the opportunity to be supported by editors, develop their writing skills and develop a professional portfolio. Companies are promised quality work that is delivered quickly with minimal investment.

I don’t think anyone comes out a winner in 90% of these arrangements. I know I lost when I wrote for a content mill ten years ago. Now that I have a freelance writing career and a book deal, I view my time writing for Content Mills as a period of intimidation designed to introduce me to the industry.

Are there high-quality content mills? In theory, yes (although it’s difficult to find good reviews that support a single company). Let’s look at content mills from the perspective of both the content mill authors and the companies that want to buy these items. You’ll probably be surprised at what you find.

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What are Content Mills?

Content mills or content farms are companies that hire a large team of freelance writers and generally pay them low wages to produce an enormous amount of content for clients.

Companies sometimes order hundreds of items at once, and the quality of the content varies greatly. The demand for content mills has fallen sharply AI writing and marketing tools.

Content Mill vs. Content Marketing Agency

Content mills may sound similar to content marketing agencies, but there are key differences.

payment

Because of the quantity over quality approach, content providers often receive very low wages. Agencies tend to value and compensate writers better and view writers as team members and not just a way to fill their marketing calendar for the year.

Learning opportunity

Content mills target novice writers and seduce them with the dream of getting paid to write and designed by professional editors. I found my job posting on Craigslist and received no training. Agencies don’t want to use up their contractors and instead want to build long-term relationships.

specialization

Agencies often specialize in a particular niche, allowing them to hire editors and freelancers who have expertise (or training) in the industry they write about. For these specialists, a good reputation is everything, and the opportunities for industry specialization are enormous.

Here’s a real-life example: Kat Smith is the founder of several popular ones Travel websitesHe was also a content manager at a digital marketing agency BuildUp bookings which specializes in the vacation rental industry.

She leads a large team of freelance writers and editors. Based on her expertise in the travel industry, she has developed a strict system for assigning articles and creating vacation content. Kat even shared that they limit writers to a certain number of articles per month in order to provide the highest quality to customers.

This bespoke, quality-focused attitude is night and day compared to mass production of content.

How content mills work

How exactly does the content mill process work? Here you will find an overview.

Authors come in and wait for tasks.

After you’re accepted as a writer by a content mill, you’ll either be assigned articles by management, or you’ll have to submit an offer and “win” article assignments from an internal job board.

Companies order items.

Companies can order any type of text from Content Mills, such as:

• Blog post with (most common).
• Product review.
• Product listing.
• Landing page.
• Copywriting.
• Fiction.

My last content mill task was writing product lists for auto parts. I didn’t even own a car. I resigned after submitting my thesis.

Authors accept orders and process them.

Authors accept orders from customers and must complete them within a certain period of time. Processing times are often short and instructions for orders vary greatly. The pay is often lower at the beginning with the promise of a raise later.

Revision period.

Once the customer receives the item, there is a period during which they can request revisions. The number of revisions available depends on the package the customer has paid for. Sometimes unlimited revisions are part of client packages.

Receive payment.

Payment methods vary depending on your agreement, but you should be paid within a certain period of time after the customer accepts your content. Sometimes the companies take a percentage of your income. One of the mills listed below requires 30%.

Content Mills you may have heard of

I don’t have any personal recommendations for content mills, so I asked ChatGPT about the most reputable mills.

ChatGPT provided WriterAccess and Verblio, although I should mention that neither of these companies use the term “content mill” to describe themselves.

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I’ve never worked with these companies directly, so I’ve read dozens of reviews from both clients and authors. Here is a summary of my findings.

WriterAccess

WriterAccess is a content marketing platform that connects companies with a large pool of writers from diverse backgrounds.

The platform allows you to vet writers to find specialized freelancers such as doctors and lawyers, meaning it has the potential to generate unique and insightful content from experts, rather than a run-of-the-mill rehash of what is already available.

There are a number of negative reviews, but one independent publisher said they were satisfied enough as a customer to order more than 5,000 items. The timestamp of this review is dated May 2022, before ChatGPT’s IPO.

It is worth noting that in their reviews of content mills, authors often believe that the number of tasks after ChatGPT decreased sharply. WriterAccess has a team of 15,000 writers, but online forums say work has declined in recent years. You can read reviews here:

Verblio

Verblio is a content platform that addresses the elephant in the room: AI content writing. They offer a dedicated AI content writing package, although other platforms offer similar services for free. You can use HubSpot for free AI content writer instead.

Verblio customers can choose between AI content and 100 human-generated texts and can also find very specific sources such as doctorates and expertise to support them in specific projects.

There are numerous reviews available online, including one from an independent provider editor He cites the experience in detail, including screenshots citing dozens of errors that the in-house editors missed. You can read reviews here:

The problem with content mills

We’ve spent the last thousand words together dancing about the underbelly of the content mill industry – let’s not be shy and take a minute to take a closer look at the difficult issues facing this type of content.

Authors can be exploited.

Muhammad Hamaz is a freelance writer who has written many published articles. His work in particular has been published in Business Insider.

But he wrote this article as a ghostwriter for the featured entrepreneur. Muhammad only received $20 in compensation, and another person’s name is on it. He’s not even listed as a co-author.

“The outsourcing culture has ruined us economically, especially authors from countries like Bangladesh, India and Pakistan,” shared Muhammad, who lives in Pakistan.

He shared that $500 per month is considered a high-paying wage for a full-time writer and that SEO writers can get a maximum of $800. For reference, an SEO writer in the US can get $800 for a single article.

“Outsourcing companies benefit from this. The work of writers needs to be recognized.”

Companies that hire content mills need to check how much the writers themselves are making if they want to outsource ethically. The money paid to the factory says nothing about how much they pay the writers.

Readers value first-hand experience.

Mills promises a stream of constant content. If you don’t carefully vet writers for expertise that fits your industry, you’ll end up publishing content from writers who simply read what’s on Google and regurgitate it.

If you’re paying writers next to nothing, you can’t expect original reporting. Writers are instructed to read what’s already online and turn it into a (sufficiently) original article.

Given that the internet is full of errors, bot content, and outdated information, the bar is set very low.

The internet doesn’t need more product reviews from people who have never tried the product (read a shocking in-depth look at this). Here).

Readers want first-hand experience; This is why so many people add “reddit” to the end of their Google searches. The pursuit of authentic experiences is changing the way the public interacts with search engines.

Google also wants authoritative articles.

Google likes authoritative writing so much that it developed the EEAT guide:

1. Experience.
2. Expertise.
3. Authority.
4. Trustworthiness.

If your content doesn’t check any of these boxes, then what’s the point? You can fill your website with thousands of words, but it’s incredibly difficult to review the content you publish.

There are too many loopholes.

If your company rents a content mill, how can you guarantee that the items are original and not stolen? Those who think they can easily detect plagiarized content are unaware of the power of the free tools on the market.

To test this, I found an article from Mayo Clinic I have suffered from high blood pressure and wanted to see how long it would take for someone to outsmart it. Using free tools, I managed to pass a plagiarism and AI scan less than five minutes.

First, I asked ChatGPT to rewrite the entire Mayo Clinic medical article:

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I then tested the article in a plagiarism detector. The first few scans failed even though I asked ChatGPT to rewrite it.

Then I gave up ChatGPT and opened a free one plagiarism Rewriter and asked it to rewrite ChatGPT’s article. The first attempt to rewrite the article achieved a 0% plagiarism scan:

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Then I read the article CopyLeaks to see if it was AI generated. CopyLeaks reported that this entire article was actually AI, so I read through it Text humanizer.

With just one try using a free AI-to-human text tool, I was able to get this article to pass a CopyLeaks scan:

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This is important: Ethical writers would never steal content, but many content mills are not ethical companies. While writing for a content mill, I was encouraged by editors to paraphrase articles I found online and take ideas from them. That’s why my tenure there was so short.

Content writing and AI

Lying or sloppy use of AI is unnecessary when the freelance market is full of incredible writers to build relationships with.

I’m often asked (too often) what I think about AI as a freelance writer. This question is too big to answer here, but I wanted to share some statistics from our State of Marketing Trends report that show AI cannot replace professional writers:

• 95% of marketers use generative AI to create copy have to edit the text44% say they are making significant changes.
• 60% of marketers share the concern that AI can do this damage the reputation of your brand through plagiarism, bias or lack of alignment with brand values.
• Fortunately, only 6% of marketers say they use AI to create marketing entire content for her.

The originality of writing is difficult to assess, and even established publications are caught red-handed using AI articles written by fake people. Read more about it Sports Illustrated for a shocking exposé. Or Microsoft. Or any of it.

It makes sense to use AI in marketing, but those who are careless will pay the price.

Everyone promised the moon.

Content Mills make big promises including:

• Increases in cents per word.
• Overall earning potential.
• Item quality.
• Optimization.
• Education.

Both companies and authors must be critical of these promises.

Here is an example from my experience. The content mill I worked for sold companies search engine optimized website articles, but the only SEO guidance I received was this: Use one keyword five times per article. This company could have offered real training or referred writers to free online training.

As a writer, I needed real training. I had very little professional writing experience. I knew nothing about SEO and relied on the guidance I was given.

Looking back, I think the editors really knew something about SEO. If they had spent an hour taking the outdoors SEO training At HubSpot Academy they would have learned more than what they taught their authors.

To paraphrase a one-star review for a content mill posted on Indeed: “They chew up writers and spit them out like it’s nothing, and not because of a lack of talent, but because the editorial team doesn’t understand what’s going on they do.” Authors are set up to fail from the start.”

Authors don’t benefit enough.

Freelance writers leave their writing jobs with more than one payment method. Of course they are compensated financially, but they also count on things like:

• LinkedIn recommendations.
• Government building.
• Portfolio growth.
• Competence building.
• Recommendations.

Because the content mill acts as an intermediary between authors and the publications that publish their works, freelance writers are unable to build lasting relationships with their clients.

The lack of property is no coincidence. It’s part of some content mills’ contracts with freelance writers, which require writers to use a pseudonym for “privacy reasons” so customers can’t find them online and search for them independently of the company.

Content Mills: What to Do Instead

There’s been a lot of talk about what not to do when outsourcing content. So what should you focus on?

Develop a content strategy.

How many high-quality blog posts can you publish per month? Answering this question will set the stage for you Editorial calendar and strategy. We can walk you through every step of this process:

Quality over quantity.

Quality content that serves your audience and drives leads takes time to develop. Focus on creating content that your customers and your industry actually need. It brings you closer to your target audience and helps you better understand your own product and business.

That takes time.

Wirecutter is known to spend 20 to 200 hours write new guidelines. I recently launched a new niche website on a Portuguese pilgrimage routeand I wrote over 35,000 words to build traffic from the ground up.

I could buy a lot of blog posts for $10 written by people who have never been to Portugal, but what’s the point?

You don’t reap the benefits of content marketing if you do it poorly.

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Position yourself as a leader.

Great content doesn’t add to the noise; It guides and positions you as a subject matter expert. Both freelance writers and companies looking to produce more content can prioritize this with:

1. Continuous training.
2. Original reporting.
3. Networking.

Not only will this make your content more Google EEAT-ready, but it will inevitably make your content more valuable to readers. For an example of incredible leadership through content creation, look at the level of engagement Fresh from home brought to his readership.

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Invest in writers.

“We feel like you know our business better than we do.” A client told me over lunch when we finally met in real life after I had worked remotely as a content manager for two years. This is the result of long-term relationships with freelancers rather than churn-and-burn outsourcing.

Get in touch with authors directly. Find us on LinkedIn or platforms like UpWork. Ask your industry contacts for a direct author recommendation. List your freelance position on job boards and let us come to you.

While experienced writers are ready to get started, consider giving a less experienced freelancer a chance and training them. Start with a paid trial period for freelance writers and train them. Pay fairly and invest and you will see the results.

While not specific to the writing industry, this post beautifully summarizes the value of hiring someone with no experience:

Content mills will not encourage meaningful interaction

While I’m no stranger to content mills, while researching I was shocked to see hundreds of negative experiences detailed online.

Some freelancers manage to find content mill jobs that help them develop their writing skills and build their portfolio, but these results are not the norm. There are better freelance writing jobs that offer reliable income and real professional growth.

I hope these insights can help humanize the freelance writing industry for companies looking for content. We deserve better than what content mills can offer; You do that too.