Cheap Content, Weak Sites
He was pissed at me from the get-go.
I had taken the time to show him a small portfolio of my work but before we really engaged in conversation he seemed suspicious of me. It wasn’t like I was asking for access to his server or anything like that. He simply needed a writer and I was responding. He needed an article for his job-search portal.
I have been writing for Internet audiences for well over a decade. I have expertise in a variety of professional areas, including career counseling, and have written hundreds if not thousands of articles that are indexed online. He could, I assured him, simply Google my name and find plenty of examples.
Yet he treated me with a disdain I found unsettling.
Writers often suffer from such behavior. Editors in general are the bane of a writer’s existence. But here on the Internet, it’s just brutal for writers overall. Just cruise any decent webmaster’s forum and you’ll see why: writers these days are offering to churn out content for less than half a penny a word. At those rates, you’d need to be a machine just to starve.
How can the written word become so devalued in a medium that is still, for all its whiz bang flash and technology, dependent upon good old fashioned text?
It’s simple, really.
Many webmasters are quite young. Most lack real world professional experience. Frankly most would write the work themselves and spare the expense at all if it weren’t for the time needed to generate it. So they go to the lowest bidder and in many cases that is just what they get — nonsensical compositions from non-native language speaking wordsmiths from some dark corner of the world where earning a nickle is more important than doing a job well.
Futhering weakening sites is a propensity to write articles for search engines rather than readers. I cringe when given assignments requiring X amounts of certain keywords. It destroys the art, stifles the creativity and offends the reader to deal with any piece so mechanically written.
Great content is just like great music or stunning graphics: if it cannot be valued by the end users then the presentation of it will fail, no matter how well a website works.
I have to laugh when I see webmasters profess to have “hundreds of ongoing writing projects” at pennies per word. And I have to cry when I see writers lower themselves to that level.
Writers do not deserve to be paid the same as programmers and coders. They deserve to be paid more.
