I have a hard time understanding a business that expects people to pay for online content when they won’t pay for it themselves.
In my 15 years as a freelancer, no outlet has ever paid me additional money for the added benefit of putting my stories online. That is expected to be part of the deal. When I sell a story, I’m selling away my rights, and they can put it on the web, in a book, or on a billboard on the moon, and I see no more than the paltry sum I was paid when I first turned my piece in. But they can charge people to read it all they want.
In other words: newspapers like the New York Times expect to profit off of their internet readership by charging for online content. But content generators–writers–rarely see one penny of that money.
Even worse are those online outlets which now expect us to make a living at the going rate of $3-$5 for a 300-500 word blog post. Unbelievable!
I am outsourcing creation of 200+ articles a month. 300-500 words; I provide creative content direction. Must know how to write for KWD. Social website knowledge a big plus.
• Compensation: $3-$5 per article. Current writers making $15+/hr.
That’s a whopping penny a word! Are you kidding me? Hey, Steve Wyer: fuck you. And fuck anyone who thinks so little of themselves or what they do that they would willingly devalue their creative output this way.
Do you folks think we writers basically fart out our content? Do you expect facts to be checked or even a run of spell-check? Do you want the basic rules of grammar obeyed? This is what it’s come to: writers’ output is completely devalued so some middleman can rake in the profits, and who cares what the finished product is like. As long as it makes money for the Steve Wyers of the world.
And trust me, there are plenty of them. Craigslist and MediaBistro and Guru.com are filled with “buyers” looking for suckers to exploit, writers so desperate for an outlet that they might as well give it away for free. And I’m sure there are folks lined up for a $5 gig because they don’t know any better. Well, let me just tell you folks right now: not too many years ago I got $500 for that same article. Why are they getting away with devaluing our product? Because they can.
Listen, kids: Who needs to be exploited by the middleman (and we all know how to say that in French don’t we? “Entre-preneur” = “middle taker”). Just go straight to the source and offer your services directly. No one deserves to be treated like a Third World sweatshop laborer. Three dollars an article? That’s insulting. Write them yourself, asshole.
This is not the first time I’ve written about this but I’m still pissed off. I’m tired of people treating what we do like it doesn’t matter. What would happen if all writers went on strike for a week? There would be no blogs, no books, no newspapers, no magazine articles, no scripts. Yeah, I know it won’t happen, but a writer can dream.
>Penny a word, huh. Well here is two cents worth to share with them – "Fuck You"
>Huh… at a penny a word, I guess talk IS cheap!37°52'18s N / 122°16'18s W
>I've had people offer to pay me $25 for a logo design. I'm always like, add a 0 to the end and we'll talk.
>Dolphin –Imagine getting to a point where you have to tell people to add TWO zeroes ….GAH.
>Nothing wrong with that Craiglist ad. He's willing to provide payment for a service. Sure, I'm not going to take him up on that offer, but just because you don't agree with the compensation he's offering doesn't make him a bad person.Those who won't write for that price will go elsewhere. If he can't get anyone to write for that price he will raise his level of compensation until he can get folks. Ah, the wonders of the free market.
>I love that craigslist ad. So if "current writers" are making $15/hour as it claims, at 1 cent/word, 1,500 words, that would mean each author would have 6-10 minutes to create the content for each of the 3-5 articles produced in one hour. The remaining 30 minutes would be used to type them all up at 50 wpm.wtf more like it
> Ah, the wonders of the free market.Ah yes, wonderful for the guy who placed the ad, not so wonderful for everyone else, who suddenly find a product that was once worth $500 is now worth $5.It's not just writers who deal with this. It's everything. Farmers and woodworkers and laborers and construction workers: everyone has found their work suddenly devalued so some middleman can get his cut. I guess that's why they call it a "Depression." Ooops, wasn't supposed to use the D word.See, that's the problem: people who have no fucking clue about how things actually work continue to stick to their theory of how they wished they worked.
>"See, that's the problem: people who have no fucking clue about how things actually work continue to stick to their theory of how they wished they worked."Really – is that what you just typed? Here is a clue. If you can't sell something for $500 then it is not worth $500. It is only worth what someone else is willing to pay you for it. Now you can wish that the government would come in and mandate that your product is worth $500 and maybe even that every paper must buy it. But I would not count on many papers staying in business with that setup
>It is only worth what someone else is willing to pay you for it.It works the other way around too. When you build a cultural mindset that you shouldn't have to pay a decent wage, you'll only get workmanship that isn't worth a decent wage. Welcome to the degradation of civilization.
>that's the problem: people who have no fucking clue about how things actually work continue to stick to their theory of how they wished they worked.If his offer is shit then no one will take him up on it and he'll have to offer more.As for your statement, you mean like people who support gun control because "reducing the # of guns will reduce crime."If there was ever a policy promulgated by those who don't have a fucking clue how things actually work it would be gun control.It is a policy of gleamy eyed idealism about how you wish the world would work vs. how it actually works.
>dolphin – paying a decent wage does not guarantee you decent workmanship though. And artificially creating a higher wage through government mandates like minimum wage laws does nothing to create better workmanship from these jobs. What it does is bump people out of the workplace that cannot generate enough revenue for an employer to justify their job. If you have to pay a burger flipper $10/hour and you can only make $8/hour from his labor, then it makes sense that that person will not have a job.Now SB did not suggest that the government should step in for this particular situation, but I am not sure what she was hoping to hear either. Maybe she is just complaining with no expectation that things change. The point is, the person placing the ad has no power to force people to take his wage if they don't want it. Why should the government have the power to force a wage scale on an employer if they don't want to pay it and can find people they are happy with to work for them at the wages they are offering?And Mike – are you just pulling demo's chain now?
>Perfect job in a free market.Answer phone calls with the help of a computer. Make sure you can do eighty calls per hour, because if you can't someone else can. All bathroom breaks must occur during two ten-minute breaks and one half-hour lunch break. We can pay you two dollars an hour, the Alito court has declared the minimum wage unconstitutional.Wherefore all this plugging of the "free market?" Riled up about credit card regulation? Possible regulation of banks and hedge funds? God forbid. We'll all be in lines that go around the block hoping to buy toilet paper.
>I am not sure what she was hoping to hear either.I can't speak for SB, but when I have made similar posts about the design world, it's to encourage other designers to not work for peanuts, and to help others understand the value they are getting in quality design. In fact there's a rather large campaign that's spun out of the proliferation of "speculative work" that's demanded of many designers and other creative freelancers (in otherwords, do the work first and if I like it I'll pay for it, otherwise you worked for free). You can read more about it here: http://www.no-spec.com/ if you are interested.Devaluation of the creative workforce serves no one. Remove creativity from a civilization and I'm completely convinced that the civilization will fail.
>"As for your statement, you mean like people who support gun control because "reducing the # of guns will reduce crime."If there was ever a policy promulgated by those who don't have a fucking clue how things actually work it would be gun control.It is a policy of gleamy eyed idealism about how you wish the world would work vs. how it actually works."Southern Beale:Would you, just as an experiment, write a post about the musical, "Annie Get Your Gun" to see how long it will take mikey to try to work that into a thread about gun control?
>Democommie proves he's still unable to provide concise, substantive comments….I was merely using her own statement to draw a parallel and highlight her hypocrisy. I know how much you HATE that Democommie.
>Sure you were mikey, sure you were.