What Are Content Mills?
Content mills, or content farms, are businesses that hire many freelance writers for low wages to produce vast amounts of content for clients. Businesses sometimes order hundreds of articles at once, and content quality varies greatly. The demand for content mills has decreased with AI writing and marketing tools.
Content Mill vs. Content Marketing Agency
Payment
Writers are often paid very low wages by content mills because of the quantity-over-quality approach. Agencies tend to value writers more and compensate them better. They see writers as team members instead of just a way to fill up their marketing calendar for the year.
Learning Opportunity
Content mills target inexperienced writers, tempting them with the dream of being paid to write and shaped by professional editors. Agencies don’t want to churn and burn through their contractors and instead want to build long-term relationships.
Specialisation
Agencies often specialise in a specific niche, allowing them to hire editors and freelancers who have expertise in the industry they’re writing about. Reputation is everything to these specialists, and the opportunity for industry specialisation is enormous.
Here’s a real-world example: Kat Smith is the founder of several popular travel websites, as well as being the content manager at a digital marketing agency BuildUp Bookings that specialises in the vacation rental industry. She manages a large team of freelance writers and editors. Based on her expertise in the travel industry, she’s developed a rigorous system for assigning articles and creating vacation content. Kat even shared that they cap writers at a specific number of articles per month to maintain the highest quality for clients.
This tailored, quality-first attitude is like night and day when compared to content mass production.
How Content Mills Work
So, how exactly does the content mill process work? Here’s an overview.
Writers Join and Wait for Assignments
After getting accepted by a content mill as a writer, you’ll either get assigned articles by management, or you’ll have to bid and “win” article assignments from an internal job board.
Companies Order Articles
Companies can order any type of writing from content mills, such as:
- Blog posts (most common)
- Product reviews
- Product listings
- Landing pages
- Copywriting
- Fiction
Writers Accept and Process Assignments
Writers accept assignments from clients and have to complete them during a specific time period. Turnaround time is often quick, and instructions on assignments vary greatly. Payment is often lower in the beginning with the promise of a raise down the road.
Revision Period
Once the client receives the article, there’s a period where they can request revisions. The number of revisions available depends on the package that the client paid for; sometimes unlimited revisions are a part of client packages.
Receive Payment
Payment methods vary based on your agreement, but you should be paid within a specified period of having your content accepted by the client. The companies will sometimes take a percentage of your earnings.
Content Mills You Might’ve Heard Of
WriterAccess
WriterAccess is a content marketing platform that connects businesses with a large pool of writers with diverse backgrounds. The platform allows you to vet writers to find specialised freelancers like doctors and lawyers, which means it has the potential to generate unique and insightful content by experts.
While there’s a fair number of negative reviews out there, one independent publisher said that they were happy enough as a client to order 5,000+ articles. It’s worth noting that a common sentiment from writers in their reviews of content mills is that the number of assignments plummeted post-ChatGPT. WriterAccess boasts a team of 15,000 writers, but online forums say that the work has been declining in recent years.
Verblio
Verblio is a content platform that addresses the elephant in the room: AI content writing. They offer a specific AI content writing package, though other platforms offer similar services for free. Verblio clients can choose between AI content and 100% human-generated writing, and they can also find very specific sources such as PhDs and subject matter expertise to help with specific projects.
The Problem with Content Mills
Writers Can Be Taken Advantage Of
Muhammad Hamaz is a freelance writer who has penned many published articles. Most notably, his work has been published in Business Insider. But he wrote that piece as a ghostwriter for the entrepreneur who was featured. Muhammad was only compensated $20, and someone else’s name is on it.
He shared that “$500 per month is considered a high-paying wage for a full-time writer” in his region, and that SEO writers can get paid $800 maximum. For reference, an SEO writer in the US can be paid $800 for a single article.
“The outsourcing culture has drowned us economically, especially writers from countries like Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan,” Muhammad shared, who’s located in Pakistan.
Readers Value First-Hand Experience
Mills promise a stream of constant content. Unless you vet writers very well for expertise that matches up with your industry, you’ll end up publishing content by writers who are just going to read what’s on Google and then regurgitate it.
When you pay writers almost nothing, you can’t expect original reporting. Writers are instructed to read what’s already online and turn that into an original (enough) article. Given that the internet is full of mistakes, bot content, and outdated information, this sets the bar very low.
The internet doesn’t need more product reviews being written by people who have never tested the product. Readers want first-hand experience; it’s why so many people add “reddit” to the end of their Google query.
Google Wants Authoritative Articles, Too
Google likes authoritative writing so much that it developed the EEAT guidance:
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
If your content doesn’t check any of these boxes, then what’s the point of it?
There Are Too Many Loopholes
If your company is hiring a content mill, how can you guarantee that the articles are original and not stolen? Those who think they can easily detect plagiarised content writing are not aware of the power of the free tools on the market.
Ethical writers would never steal content, but many content mills are not ethical companies. During the author’s time writing for a content mill, editors encouraged paraphrasing and taking ideas from articles found online.
Content Writing and AI
Lying or sloppily using AI is unnecessary when the freelance marketplace is full of incredible writers with whom you can build relationships.
Several statistics demonstrate that AI isn’t here to replace professional writers:
- 95% of marketers who use generative AI to generate copy have to edit the text, with 44% reporting they make significant changes.
- 60% of marketers share the concern that AI can harm their brand’s reputation through plagiarism, bias, or misalignment with brand values.
- Only 6% of marketers say they use AI to produce an entire piece of content for them.
The originality of writing is hard to gauge, and even established publications are getting caught red-handed using AI articles written by fake personas.
Everyone’s Promised the Moon
Large promises are made by content mills, spanning:
- Raises in cents per word
- Overall earning potential
- Article quality
- Optimisation
- Training
Both companies and writers need to be critical of these promises. Here’s an example: the content mill sold companies search-engine-optimised website articles, but the only SEO guidance provided was to use a keyword 5 times per article. This falls short of comprehensive instruction.
Writers Don’t Benefit Enough
Freelance writers leave writing gigs with more than one type of payment. They’re financially compensated, of course, but they also count on things like:
- LinkedIn recommendations
- Authority building
- Portfolio growth
- Skill building
- Referrals
With the content mill as the middleman between writers and the publications publishing their work, freelance writers are unable to build lasting relationships with their clients. The lack of ownership isn’t an accident. Some content mills’ contracts with freelance writers require writers to use an alias for “privacy” so that clients cannot find them online.
What to Do Instead
Develop a Content Strategy
How many high-value blog posts can you publish per month? Answering that question will set the stage for your editorial calendar and strategy.
Quality Over Quantity
Quality content that serves your audience and nurtures leads takes time to develop. Focus on making content that your customers and industry actually need.
Wirecutter famously spends 20 to 200 hours writing new guides. You don’t tap into the benefits of content marketing when you do it poorly.
Position Yourself as a Leader
Great content doesn’t contribute to the noise; it leads and positions you as a subject matter expert. Both freelance writers and companies looking to produce more content can prioritise this with:
- Ongoing education
- Original reporting
- Networking
Not only will this EEAT-ify your content for Google, but it will also inevitably make your content more valuable for readers.
Invest in Writers
“We feel like you know our business better than we do.” A client told the author after working remotely as their content manager for two years. This is the result of long-term relationships with freelancers instead of churn-and-burn outsourcing.
Connect with writers directly. Find them on LinkedIn or platforms like UpWork. Ask for a direct writer referral from your industry connections. List your freelance position on job boards, and let qualified writers come to you. While experienced writers are ready to hit the ground running, consider giving a less-experienced freelancer a chance and training them.
Conclusion: Why Content Mills Fail
While content mills may seem cost-effective, they often deliver poor results. Some freelancers will manage to find content mill jobs that help them develop their writing skills, but those outcomes are not the norm. There are better freelance writing jobs that offer reliable income and real professional growth. Both companies and writers deserve better than what content mills can offer.