My Rollercoaster Ride With a Content Mill. Is This Kind of Writing Right For You?

In short: believe everything you hear. It’s true.

Content mill writing can yield you a steady paycheck as a writer. In addition, it checks all the boxes for detail-oriented people, learners, and perfectionists.

But content mills have a negative connotation…and for good reason. There are countless stories online of writers who’ve gotten ripped off by these companies.

However, if you find the right place, you can earn a buck and learn a thing or two about the topics you're asked to write about.

Is it right for you?

Why I Worked for a Content Mill

Last year, I took a chance and decided to write for a content mill. I did thorough research first. I wanted an opportunity where I had some say over what I wrote and where they paid you and on a regular frequency.

I was doing this for the experience more than anything else. Since I started seriously pursuing my writing career for the first time last year, I wanted to explore different avenues to see what I did and didn’t like.

The Place I Worked For

The content mill I went with had a very good reputation, and they were not a scam.

At this company, you could select from hundreds of articles, you were not responsible for the SEO of your articles, and your writing would go straight to a review team to provide polish and feedback on missteps. They also paid their writers decently fast.

TL;DR

In the end, I’ve decided I don’t like the kind of writing and the process required for content mills. But they might be right for you, or temporarily right for you.

If you’re lucky enough to find a content mill that won’t scam you, they can provide a consistent source of income.

However, to make a full-time living at a content mill, you have to like it. Because there will be little time to do much else.

What is a “Content Mill”?

Before I go down the path of relaying my experiences, let me first define what a content mill is, according to me.

It’s a company that provides low-cost, average-quality written content to customers. Many work off the concepts of volume and tight SEO and sacrifice quality in the process. This is not to say that the hard-working writers don’t put in a good effort — it’s more a product of the process. Because content gets pumped out quickly, it can’t be super high quality unless the writer is paid accordingly.

Content mills employ writers who write articles of varying lengths whose topics are pre-determined by their customers. The goal of the content is usually to push traffic to the customer’s website. Generally, you are one writer in a pool of writers working for the content mill. There are strict rules that you must abide by. You may or may not be responsible for the SEO of your content. You are most likely paid by the word or the hour.

To me, a content mill is not the same thing as freelance writing. Freelance is putting yourself out there on sites like Upwork, ClearVoice, and Fivver and you are establishing a 1:1 relationship and writing directly for a customer.

As a freelance writer, you will most likely advertise your niche expertise/desired writing topics, and the customer will choose to work with you based on that fit. You can charge whatever you want and you can turn down projects if you aren’t feeling it. You will go back and forth with your customer on edits. You may also be responsible for things beyond just writing, like SEO, optimized headlines, and more.

My Humble Beginnings

I was thrilled when I took the multiple-choice writing test for this content mill and passed, and then passed the written sample test. It was the second content mill I applied to, and the only one that ever got back to me on potential employment. I had applied to 3 total content mills. I was happy any of them responded, as I was brand new to this type of writing.

The way this content mill works is you can select from a pool of hundreds of articles, although they are generally focused on just a handful of topics. You research and write the article, then submit it for review. A review team ensures you follow all content and syntax rules and may send it back if any corrections are necessary. You have no direct access to the review team to ask follow-up questions. A single liaison is provided to the writers in case we have any questions.

Each article has a recommended due date. You can work on only one article at a time, and they are initially limited to 500 words.

The pay was dismal, only $0.02 per word for beginners. Therefore, you would make $10 per article (500 words) at first. Once you proved yourself, they’d open the pool to better-paying articles that were longer and covered a higher variety of topics. The highest paying articles revealed to me paid $0.03 per word, with articles that went up to 2,000 words in length. Payments were distributed after the review team and customer approved your article, usually weekly. Payments were never an issue. I was usually paid within 2 weeks and I never had any errors or withholdings or other weirdness.

There were a lot of rules, however. And some were very nit-picky. Bulleted lists could only contain x number of words per line and were not allowed to end with a period. Headlines had to follow the MLA format. You could only write x number of paragraphs per heading and only x number of words per paragraph. At some point, I was spending more time making sure the formatting followed the rules versus researching and writing the content.

If you were a detail-oriented person, this was a good fit. If you were someone who was careless or could not follow rules, you could get the boot.

The first article I wrote took me ~3 hours. That means I got paid $3.33 per hour. And that equates to less once you take out taxes. However, that was my first one. To a certain extent, I expected my first few to take longer. Over time, I got faster and better. Eventually, I averaged about 45–60 minutes per 500 words. If I had to take a guess, I was probably paid an average of $12 an hour. The longer-form articles were my sweet spot because I could complete them in less time and they were worth more. I would aim to complete 3 per week and was pulling in around five hundred dollars per month at my peak.

The End

I quit my work there earlier this year. I had many reasons for it, some of which I’ll get into in a bit.

Overall, I don’t believe in a future with content mills. I’ve been doing a lot of research on Artificial Intelligence writing platforms and I truly believe robots will take over this industry of writing.

In addition, I accomplished what I set out to. My goal was to learn the ropes of content (mill) writing and make some money doing it.

In my time with them, I earned nearly $2,000. I learned a lot. And I don’t regret my decision.

Content Mills: The Good

What I liked about this content mill was its very dependable payment system. There was no secret formula — you knew exactly what you’d earn before you started an assignment. And you knew exactly when payday was every week. You could expect payment usually the same week that you wrote your articles, but sometimes it would take an extra 1–2 weeks if the customer or review team was taking longer to approve your piece.

There are so many negative experiences with other content mills that writers talk about online — especially writers who were asked to write articles that they never got paid for. I didn’t want to fall into that trap, and I’m glad I have nothing bad to report here.

Also, I was super grateful that this place accepted newbie content mill writers. The 2 other places I applied never even got back to me. It’s always nice when a place takes a chance on someone green. Although I wasn’t new to blogging nor writing non-fiction articles, and they forced me to take multiple tests, I’m still humbled they allowed me to write for them.

In addition, there were always 200+ article options you could choose from. Sometimes the topics varied greatly. You didn’t have to be an expert in any of the topics, but you did have to do decent research. I learned so much and enjoyed doing so in the process.

Finally, sometimes you got a good reviewer who would give you exact feedback on what rules you didn’t follow. I loved those reviewers. The list of rules was ~20 pages long, and there was much subjectivity in those rules.

Content Mills: The Bad

The content mill had to be strict about the rules because their customers expected it. However, sometimes the customer wanted something that broke from the content mill’s traditional rules. You would have to look in at least 3 different areas to reconstruct the narrative of the request. If you missed reading one area, you could easily get lambasted by the review team for failure to comply. Unfortunately, their training was minimal, so revisions were requested multiple times from me for these types of articles.

The review could be inconsistent at times, based on their interpretation of the rules. I’d get one request for an edit asking me to format something one way. Then a different reviewer would ask me to format the same thing differently on another piece. This didn’t happen often, but it was frustrating when it did. I complained once to the liaison, but it was clear that this was just the way it was going to be.

Some members of the review team were abusive, accusatory, and threatening. I’m a decent writer. I’ve been writing for over 40 years. While writing wasn’t my primary career path at any point in time, I’ve been writing in some capacity my entire career. I’m not perfect, as most humans aren’t. I say all this to convey that I’m not an inexperienced writer. It was crazy sometimes the responses I received back from their review team. And don’t get me wrong — in most cases, they were right when I misunderstood or forgot a very specific rule. I’d make the requested edits as soon as I could and leave it at that in those cases.

However, sometimes there would be threats about my future at the content mill because of a single mistake. One time a reviewer went on a tirade (several pages long) because I used the word “on” instead of “in” in a single sentence. They were incorrect — both prepositions are acceptable in American English for that situation. I forwarded the strange tirade to the liaison, who had nothing to say on the matter.

On multiple occasions, I was also accused of:

• being from a different country (? I’m just as confused as you are)
• being multiple people under a single account (definitely not true)
• providing incorrect research (once I had to send proof that the reviewer was, in fact, the one in the wrong)
• using formatting and syntax incorrectly…that weren’t even present in my writing

It’s hard to work with a group of people you don’t have direct access to, especially if all correspondence occurs only through automated emails. And we writers are a brooding bunch. We don’t like it when people call our writing ugly. Most of the time, I didn’t say anything and just submitted the requested edits to the best of my ability. But when the accusations started getting out of hand and they restricted the pool of articles to me to only beginner ones, I decided enough was enough. I formally submitted my resignation. It just wasn’t worth my time anymore.

Concluding Thoughts

One of my writing friends told me early on that I should quit after the first round of false accusations and threats. I decided to stay on for a few more months, however, because I had a financial goal I needed to reach. After I met it, I quit.

There are going to be rude people everywhere you go. You can’t avoid people if you want to live a fulfilling life with love and meaningful connections. Some of those people are having a hard time in life and they’re going to be rude to everyone in their wake. It’s not an excuse, just the reality of many people around the world right now. I’ve chosen to pick my battles and move on.

Do I regret my time there? No. I really, truly don’t.

For the most part, the experience was positive. I learned what I came to learn and I made some decent money at it. And now I have a story to tell and some wisdom to share.

What are your experiences with content mills?

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