
What it's like to write for content farms, from Brooklyn to the Philippines - nols
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/city/what_do_you_do/216643-content-farm-writers-philippines
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austenallred
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.

~~~
stevesearer
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.

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

~~~
stevesearer
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.

------
sparkzilla
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.

~~~
romaniv
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.

~~~
ninv
>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.

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sageabilly
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.

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AJ007
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."

~~~
dazc
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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sandworm101
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?

~~~
benologist
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=githubengineering.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com)

etc

~~~
DaveWalk
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.

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jdalgetty
They too are looking for more writers -
[https://twitter.com/hopesandfearshq/status/58510384519119667...](https://twitter.com/hopesandfearshq/status/585103845191196672)

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DaveWalk
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.

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tyc2021
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?

~~~
eevilspock
yes. email me.

