There is a growing content market out there on the Internet. Yet it has not found its level. You can have content for as cheap as $1 dollar for 500 words to $50 for 500 words and all the shades in between. The range indicates that quality is not the altar at which the content buyers and content sellers are worshipping. It is the quanitity of content that one can command at a cheap price, that seems to govern the market. If you browse the Internet you will find that there are a large number of project auction sites like http://www.rentacoder.com or http://www.elance.com or http://www.ifreelance.com which bring buyers and sellers of articles together. Of course, these sites take a large commission for the service and in a sense, are not really responsible for the quality of content that is bought and sold.
What is the modus operendi of this market? It is an online market where buyers post auctions for projects–software or writing projects.
- The content buyers specify the maximum monetary limit and the site specifies or does not specify a minimum monetary limit per project.
- Sellers enter the content market with their bids and samples of previous work.
- The site provides an overview of content seller and content buyer reputation and a selection is made by the buyer from among the bidders on the basis of the samples, reputation overview or whatever criteria that the seller decides to make the basis of his selection.
- Time frames for completion of the project can be specified by the buyer and the seller must agree or request extention of time frame for comfortable execution of the project.
- Funds may or may not escrowed with the auctioning site while the project work is in progress. If the funds are escrowed, the buyer and seller must agree that the work iscompleted in all respects before the funds are released to the seller account. If funds are not escrowed, the seller must just cross his fingers and hope that he will get paid for the work he has executed.
- If there is a dispute and the site has an arbitration process in place, the bias is heavily in f avor of the buyer. Perhaps, the site does not want to displease those who bring it business?
Unfortunately, this is a buyers market and the buyers who populate this market have a clear cut agenda. They enter this market for quantity of content, rather than quality of content(barring a few exceptions). They are out there, to get sufficient number of articles for posting to article directories and getting themselves back links to their sites, so that the google rank improves. This is very similar to the trend that was noticed in the early days of site rankings when everyone filled their pages with keywords, just to get the attention of search engines and to get good page ranks for their sites. Neither the writer nor the visitor seems to be the focus of attention on these sites. Quality does not matter. Information does not matter. So, it is no wonder that visitors who come to sites via search engines leave the site disappointed and little puzzled by the results thrown up by search engines!
The sellers are weak, unorganized and desperate set of individuals who are willing to sell their writing talent for a song. The auctioning process, places the best and the worst of writers on par. Often it is the worst writer who is willing to work for as little as $1 an article who succeeds in getting the most number of projects. The writers who provide quality content, have to struggle for years to get to the happy position of offering their services to buyers for a little over $5 an article of 500 words–even that is exploitation as it takes about an hour to produce an article of good quality–the base labor rate is $7 per hour or more in most parts of USA. Many leave the market dispirited and discouraged as the commission demanded by the auction sites, eat into the earning and they get only 85% of their earnings credited to their user account and the final amount that reaches them via a Paypal account or a bank may be as little as 75-80% of the total project value! There is also a base minimum that is fixed as the minimum site commission in these auction sites. Some demand $3 and others $10. So it is really uneconomical for the quality article seller to work on these sites for gain if they manage to get only small projects. By the way, buyers can post their projects for free! They do not get charged a single penny for the service the site renders them!
Having said all this, the question remains should one use the auction sites to get content for websites? Shrewd business men will not stay away. So long as search engines rank sites on basis of incoming links, auction sites will have their heyday! Buyers will post projects that demand “quantities of content” whatever the quality! Sellers will flock to this market and prostitute their talent for whatever exploitative price that the buyer offers.
The question that we must really ask ourselves is: “Can we afford to showcase our products with poor quality content in an age that is transitioning from the Information era to the Knowledge era? Who will bell the cat?”
