Last week we finally got it, from the horse’s mouth, for the first time as far as I’m aware — the straight story on how much a typical writer makes working for a content site.
On Freelancewritinggigs.com, Deb Ng interviewed Demand Studios senior vice president of content and editorial Jerry Reed.
Among her questions:
“What does the average Demand Studios writer earn in a given month?”
The answer:
“The majority of writers do this on a part-time basis to complement other forms of income. But, what we’ve seen is the typical writer earns a few hundred dollars a month.”
Now, when someone says “several hundred” to me…it means $300. Maybe $400. Above there you’d say “more than several hundred” or some such.
Of course, the missing piece in this conversation is: They earn several hundred dollars a month…writing how many articles? And how long does that take them? If they’re all $20 articles, that would be roughly 15 articles a month. Is that all they have time for? All they can get assigned? All they can stand?
When I write 15 articles in a month, I’m generally paid somewhere between $4,000 and $7,500 by my current clients, depending on the situation. Still think it’s not worth the time to pitch editors?
One aspect of the article I found amusing was Reed’s anecdotal report that “we hear from our writers that they earn somewhere between $15 and $30 an hour.”
I think we can assume the writers Reed hears from are the ones who write real fast. Because if you can’t write an article every 45 minutes or so, you can’t make even that rate at $20 an article or less. And I’m going to assume he hears from the happy campers.
I’m hoping all the writers for Demand who’re earning less than this quoted hourly rate will drop us a comment down below…because what I hear from my writers, the ones I mentor, is that they’re often lucky to end up earning $15 an hour. They use phrases like “I feel taken advantage of” to describe their feelings about writing for mills.
And in any case, $30 an hour is ultimately not really a good wage for a freelance writer, as I’ve recently discussed on this blog.
I’m hoping that interview is read by a lot of writers who’re fantasizing about content mills providing them with a substantial living. We know there are a few writers who do in fact earn substantially from these sites — and that just means the majority of the writers are making even less than $300 a month, as the high-earners skew the average.
And the important thing to remember is Demand is one of the better paying content sites out there! Many pay less, or put you in bidding wars where you don’t know if you’ll get a dime. So this is pretty much the Cadillac pay of content sites.
Still sound appealing? I didn’t think so.
Additional reading on the content mill issue:
The 5 Types of People Who Should Write for Content Sites
Screw You! My Short-Lived Experiment at Demand Studios by Kathy Kehrli of Irreverent Freelancer.