What It's Like To Write For Demand Media: Low Pay But Lots of Freedom

My wife, who has graduate degrees in Mathematics and Creative Writing, wrote for Demand Media while we were in a transition period between traditional employment and passive income. She knocked out advanced math articles 2, sometimes 3 per hour, making around $300 a day, which roughly works out to $72,000 a year.

That's twice the money she could've made as a full time academic starting out, for example.

It's not all roses, but for someone who can write and needs to make ends meet for a while, it's a hell of an opportunity to make a bunch of money pretty much on your own terms. It beats the hell out of flipping burgers.

The biggest secret of Demand Media is that they have managed to take advantage of the biggest mispricing of labor in the global economy: that the market wage for an American with a graduate degree is zero if she is also a stay-at-home mother. If Demand Media offers her what amounts to $6 to $8 an hour, she'll quite often leap at the chance. (The economics of this have been well understood by SEOs for a few years, but doing it on an industrial scale is a fairly recent innovation.)

This is the logical extension and evolution of "user" generated content. The great myth of 2006 Web2.0 was the whole "if you build it, they will come". Well, it depends on what you build, and what they'll do when they come. For aggregator sites like HN, Digg, etc the content comes in the form of simple voting and discussions.

Voting is easy and solved. People will do it. Engaging in discussions is easy and solved. People will do it.

Writing useful content for a broader audience without too much direct feedback like you get with discussions... well, getting people to volunteer their time, effort and knowledge. That's not solved. Compound this with the necessity to write about "boring" topics and you have quite a situation.

I'd say the only two sites that have solved it are WikiHow, and Wikipedia.

Of course the demand for such content is there. People ARE obviously searching for how-tos, and general information and there's obviously money to be made from this traffic. So what's easier: figure out a way to get people to write these kind of articles for free or just pay a nominal amount such that it's worth the writer's time, and you're able to get a healthy ROI?

If anything, I see a business opportunity here. There are quite a few companies involved in this content generation space, and it's actually increasing as time goes on. Every single one of them appears to be reinventing the wheel in regards to writer management, pay, editing, etc.

I can tell you that a SaaS 3rd party system that plugs into a filterable pool of writers, editors and is easy to manage would do extremely extremely well. It could be a layer on top of Mechanical Turk, or a totally home-grown solution. Maybe use a bidding model. The details can be sorted out later, but something like this WILL get built in the next 12-18 months, if it doesn't already exist.

Is there any kind of possible career progression from doing this? I can't see any.

It's one thing to work like a dog for little money for some chance at success... it's another to do so without any opportunity for progress. That's what makes them a sweatshop, imho, whether or not you can work from your living room.

Where Freedom includes the right to 'unlimited unpaid vacation time'. Sounds a lot like some sales jobs actually.

I know it's a horrible thing to say, but was anyone else distracted by the giant forehead on the picture?