Content mills: the corner of the internet where everyone's promised the moon, but most people are left in the dark.
Writers are offered an opportunity to be nurtured by editors, build their writing skills, and develop a professional portfolio. Companies are promised quality work that's delivered quickly for a minimal investment.
I don't think anyone comes out a winner in 90% of these arrangements. I know I lost when I wrote for a content mill ten years ago. Now with a freelance writing career and a book deal to my name, I see my time writing for content mills as a hazing period meant to induct me into the industry.
Do quality content mills exist? Theoretically, yes (though it‘s hard to find good reviews to back any single company up). Let’s examine content mills from the perspective of both the content mill writers and the companies looking to buy these articles. You'll probably be surprised at what you find.
Table of Contents
What are content mills?
Content mills, or content farms, are businesses that hire a large team of freelance writers and pay them generally low wages to produce an enormous amount of content for clients.
Businesses sometimes order hundreds of articles at once, and content quality varies greatly. The demand for content mills has decreased greatly with AI writing and marketing tools.
Content Mill vs. Content Marketing Agency
Content mills may sound similar to content marketing agencies, but there are key differences.
Payment
Writers are often paid very low wages by content mills because of the quantity-over-quality approach. Agencies tend to value writers and compensate them better and see writers as team members instead of simply 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. I found my job listing on Craigslist and received no training. Agencies don't want to churn and burn through their contractor and instead want to build long-term relationships.
Specialization
Agencies often specialize in a specific niche, allowing them to hire editors and freelancers who have expertise (or receive training) in the industry they're writing about. Reputation is everything to these specialists, and the opportunity for industry specialization 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 specializes 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 post with (most common).
- Product review.
- Product listing.
- Landing page.
- Copywriting.
- Fiction.
My last content mill assignment was writing product listings for car parts. I didn't even own a car. I resigned after I submitted my final work.
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. One of the below mills takes 30%.
Content Mills You Might've Heard Of
I don't have any personal recommendations for content mills, so I asked ChatGPT what the most reputable mills were.
ChatGPT provided WriterAccess and Verblio, though I should mention that neither of these companies use the term “content mill” to describe themselves.
I‘ve never worked with these companies directly, so I read dozens of reviews from both clients and writers. Here’s a summary of my findings.
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 specialized freelancers like doctors and lawyers, which means it has the potential to generate unique and insightful content by experts, rather than a run-of-the-mill rehashing of what's already out there.
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. The timestamp on this review is dated for May 2022, before ChatGPT went public.
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. You can read reviews here:
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. You can use HubSpot's free AI content writer instead.
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.
There are ample reviews available online, with one from an independent publisher citing the experience in detail, including screenshots citing dozens of errors missed by in-house editors. You can read reviews here:
The Problem with Content Mills
We‘ve spent the last thousand words together dancing around the dark side of the content mill industry — let’s not be coy and take a minute to look closely at the hard issues with this type of content.
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’s not even listed as a co-author.
“The outsourcing culture has drowned us economically, especially writers from countries like Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan,” Muhammad shared, who's located in Pakistan.
He shared that $500 per month is considered a high-paying wage for a full-time writer, 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.
“Outsourcing companies take advantage. There needs to be recognition of writers' work.”
Companies that hire content mills need to verify how much the writers themselves are paid if they want to outsource ethically. The money paid to the mill says nothing about how much they're paying writers.
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 (read a shocking deep-dive on this here).
Readers want first-hand experience; it's why so many people add “reddit” to the end of their Google query. The pursuit of authentic experience is changing the way the public engages with search engines.
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? You might fill up your site with thousands of words, but it‘s incredibly hard to verify the content that you’re publishing.
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 plagiarized content writing are not aware of the power of the free tools on the market.
To test this, I found an article from the Mayo Clinic on high blood pressure and wanted to see how long it would take someone to rip it off. Using free tools, I was able to get it to pass a plagiarism and AI scan in less than five minutes.
First, I prompted ChatGPT to rewrite the entire medical article from the Mayo Clinic:
Then I tested the article in a plagiarism detector. It failed the first few scans, despite me prompting ChatGPT to rewrite it.
I then abandoned ChatGPT and opened a free plagiarism rewriter and asked it to rewrite ChatGPT's article. On its first attempt at rewriting the article, it achieved a 0% plagiarized scan:
Then, I ran the article through CopyLeaks to see if it was AI-generated. CopyLeaks reported that, indeed, this entire article was AI, so I ran it through a text humanizer.
With only one attempt using a free AI-to-human text tool, I was able to get this article to pass a CopyLeaks scan:
This is important: Ethical writers would never steal content, but many content mills are not ethical companies. During my time writing for a content mill, I was encouraged by editors to paraphrase and take ideas from articles that I found online. It's why my tenure there was so brief.
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.
I‘m asked frequently (too frequently) what I think of AI as a freelance writer. It’s too big of a question to address here, but I will share a few statistics from our State of Marketing trends report that show 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.
- Thankfully, 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. Read about Sports Illustrated for a shocking exposé. Or Microsoft. Or any of these.
It makes sense to leverage AI in marketing, but those who are careless will pay the price.
Everyone's promised the moon.
Large promises are made by content mills, spanning:
- Raises in cents per word.
- Overall earning potential.
- Article quality.
- Optimization.
- Training.
Both companies and writers need to be critical of these promises.
Here‘s an example from my experience. The content mill I worked for sold companies search-engine-optimized website articles, but the only SEO guidance that I received was this: use a keyword 5x per article. This company could’ve offered real training or directed writers to free trainings offered online.
As a writer, I needed real training. I had very little professional writing experience. I didn’t know anything about SEO and relied on the guidance I was given.
Looking back, I think that the editors genuinely knew about SEO. If they had spent one hour taking the free SEO training in HubSpot Academy, they would've learned more than they taught their writers.
To paraphrase a one-star review left on Indeed for a content mill: “They chew up and spit out writers like it's nothing, and not for lack of talent, but because the editorial team doesn't understand what they're doing. Writers are set up to fail from the start.”
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. It’s a part of some content mills' contracts with freelance writers requiring writers to use an alias for “privacy” so that clients cannot find them online and seek them out independently of the company.
Content Mills: What to Do Instead
There's been a lot of talk about what not to do with content outsourcing. So, where should you focus?
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. We can walk you through every single step of this process:
- Use our free template to build your calendar right away.
- Learn how to develop content workflows to keep your team organized and efficient.
- Use content intelligence to gauge your content's success.
- Try our content marketing software to help you generate content and scale your 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. It will bring you closer to your target audience and help you understand your own product and business better.
This takes time.
Wirecutter famously spends 20 to 200 hours writing new guides. I recently started a new niche website on a Portuguese pilgrim trail, and I‘ve written more than 35,000 words trying to build traffic from the ground up.
I could buy a bunch of $10 blog posts written by people who had never even been to Portugal, but what’s the point?
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 prioritize 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. For an example of incredible leadership through content creation, look at the level of dedication that HouseFresh has brought to its readership.
Invest in writers.
“We feel like you know our business better than we do.” A client told me over lunch when we finally met in real-life after I'd been 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 us 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 us come to you.
While experienced writers are ready to hit the ground running, consider giving a less-experienced freelancer a chance and training them. Start with a paid freelance writing trial period and train them. Pay fairly and invest, and you'll see the results.
While it's not specific to the writing industry, this post summarizes the value of hiring someone without experience beautifully:
Content Mills Won’t Drive Meaningful Interaction
While I'm no stranger to content mills, I was shocked while researching to see the hundreds of negative experiences detailed online.
Some freelancers will manage to find content mill jobs that help them develop their writing skills and build their portfolios, but those outcomes are not the norm. There are better freelance writing jobs that offer reliable income and real professional growth.
I hope that these insights can help humanize the freelance writing industry to companies looking for content. We deserve better than what content mills can offer; so do you.
