

What It's Like To Write For Demand Media: Low Pay But Lots of Freedom - dabent
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_its_like_to_write_for_demand_media.php

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pmichaud
My wife, who has graduate degrees in Mathematics and Creative Writing, wrote
for Demand Media while we were in a transition period between traditional
employment and passive income. She knocked out advanced math articles 2,
sometimes 3 per hour, making around $300 a day, which roughly works out to
$72,000 a year.

That's twice the money she could've made as a full time academic starting out,
for example.

It's not all roses, but for someone who can write and needs to make ends meet
for a while, it's a hell of an opportunity to make a bunch of money pretty
much on your own terms. It beats the hell out of flipping burgers.

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patio11
The biggest secret of Demand Media is that they have managed to take advantage
of the biggest mispricing of labor in the global economy: that the market wage
for an American with a graduate degree is _zero_ if she is also a stay-at-home
mother. If Demand Media offers her what amounts to $6 to $8 an hour, she'll
quite often leap at the chance. (The economics of this have been well
understood by SEOs for a few years, but doing it on an industrial scale is a
fairly recent innovation.)

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electromagnetic
There's always been an opportunity for the stay-at-home worker in the writing
market, however it's typically been a lot harder to access than simply
logging-on.

However on-demand online work has the pay advantages not only to stay-at-home
mothers, but anyone looking for extra money who has the ability to write well.
IMO earning $8 an hour is certainly a better choice than taking a second job
at a convenience store or somewhere when you're strapped for cash, especially
if you have young children as day care and professional baby sitters can
easily take $10 an hour, which sucks-out-loud when you're making that or less.

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OmarIsmail
This is the logical extension and evolution of "user" generated content. The
great myth of 2006 Web2.0 was the whole "if you build it, they will come".
Well, it depends on what you build, and what they'll do when they come. For
aggregator sites like HN, Digg, etc the content comes in the form of simple
voting and discussions.

Voting is easy and solved. People will do it. Engaging in discussions is easy
and solved. People will do it.

Writing useful content for a broader audience without too much direct feedback
like you get with discussions... well, getting people to volunteer their time,
effort and knowledge. That's not solved. Compound this with the necessity to
write about "boring" topics and you have quite a situation.

I'd say the only two sites that have solved it are WikiHow, and Wikipedia.

Of course the demand for such content is there. People ARE obviously searching
for how-tos, and general information and there's obviously money to be made
from this traffic. So what's easier: figure out a way to get people to write
these kind of articles for free or just pay a nominal amount such that it's
worth the writer's time, and you're able to get a healthy ROI?

If anything, I see a business opportunity here. There are quite a few
companies involved in this content generation space, and it's actually
increasing as time goes on. Every single one of them appears to be reinventing
the wheel in regards to writer management, pay, editing, etc.

I can tell you that a SaaS 3rd party system that plugs into a filterable pool
of writers, editors and is easy to manage would do extremely extremely well.
It could be a layer on top of Mechanical Turk, or a totally home-grown
solution. Maybe use a bidding model. The details can be sorted out later, but
something like this WILL get built in the next 12-18 months, if it doesn't
already exist.

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joe_the_user
Interesting,

How ISN'T Demand Media this?

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patio11
Demand Media only produces for their own properties, though. I think he is
thinking more along the lines of <http://www.textbroker.com> .

I might see about exploiting them in the New Year, incidentally, for non-core
content tasks for myself. I mean, my article on How To Create A Bingo Card
can't possibly be worse than eHow's, right?

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swombat
Is there any kind of possible career progression from doing this? I can't see
any.

It's one thing to work like a dog for little money for some chance at
success... it's another to do so without any opportunity for progress. That's
what makes them a sweatshop, imho, whether or not you can work from your
living room.

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RyanMcGreal
Some people aren't looking for career progress at a given point in their
lives. For those writers/editors just looking to make some money, right now,
with flexible hours and no strings attached, this may be exactly the
arrangement they're looking for.

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peakpg
Where Freedom includes the right to 'unlimited unpaid vacation time'. Sounds a
lot like some sales jobs actually.

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iuguy
I know it's a horrible thing to say, but was anyone else distracted by the
giant forehead on the picture?

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swombat
This is a completely pointless comment to make and you wouldn't make it to the
author's face. This would fall under the "uncivil" flag discussed in the pg
thread earlier.

