part of the problem now
Remember way back when the internet was only half ruined? Back before AOL was a web portal? Pre-Google days? 1996, say. Back then, you could research a term on AltaVista and get solid hits and great references. But then the junk began to appear. Articles that were nothing more than gibbering concatenations of phrases designed to lure a hit, or similarly nonsensical lists of hot topics tacked on the end of a half-hearted attempt at relevant content. And nowadays, a vast proliferation of trashy pap, recycled general knowledge or widely circulated misinformation, reproduced over and over until you spend much more time wading through bilge than actually gleaning any useful information.
All in the name of search engine optimization. Hits are a hot commodity, and so is rank on a Google search. Those dopey articles repeat keywords over and over, and who cares if they are written at an 8-year-old’s reading level. Or even if they’re wrong.
Here’s what really irks: Somebody is getting paid to produce that crap! Somebody not me!
Okay, I don’t really want to write the worst of the drivel. But there’s plenty of writing to be done, and I am happy to have found a marketplace that, so far, looks legitimate and even intelligently designed…maybe even ingenious.
Textbroker.com is just that, a text broker. You can sign on as a writer, get assigned a level, work your way up to better rates. The word rate is abysmal for the most part, but on the other hand, you can pick your poison. There’s always some kind of work. Clients create job orders and specify what they need and pick a writing level/rate, and the writer can look through the list and pick up whatever looks promising.
Just to give you an idea, level 5, the highest level for writers, pays 5 cents per word. I was getting 8 cents per word for that asbestos research work I did a while back. Not great pay, but not bad for a newbie freelancer, I thought. Five cents is pretty sorry, but okay considering you can pick your topic, turn down the work, even throw it back in the pot without penalty if you change your mind. The only (giant) problem is that Textbroker rarely gets level 5 jobs. And the next level down pays 1.4 cents per word.
That’s the brilliant part for them. The brilliant part for the writer, or at least the part that makes this possibly better than slave labor, is that clients can request a particular writer directly, and for those assignments, the writer can set her own rate. So it’s possibly a foot in the door for the right writer, and meanwhile it’s not such a bad introduction to freelancing life…you don’t have to get stuck with dreadfully boring topics, and you don’t have to fully embrace the feast-or-famine nature of freelancing with this setup.
It doesn’t seem likely you’d ever earn a living from these guys. Still, I’m finding it useful in its way. I pick topics that I can cover without research, or else things I might like to learn about anyway. As an info junkie, I frequently entertain myself with short ADD-fueled bursts of Googling—and why not regurgitate words and make a few cents in the process? It’s been helpful to me to sit down and knock out 400 words fast. I don’t have time to get bored, and each little article reminds me that writing is not hard, not a big mystery, not a big effort to begin—something I need to relearn constantly.
The real winners here are the people running Textbroker. It’s such a perfect combination of exploitation and opportunity. I wish I’d thought of it.
