In November of 2007 I discovered a little website (whose name I won’t mention here for reasons that will become shortly obvious) where writers could post their work and enter contests and earn a few pennies on any advertising dollars that came by way of what was posted.

My very first week there I earned $5 in one of the writing contests, and I must say, having written and published in paper media for years for pretty much nothing except copies and satisfaction (lots of little literary publications pay in copies), that $5 was almost like my first shot of heroin.

Money for writing! On the internet! And it was SO easy!

I’m an American and a natural addict, but seriously, who doesn’t like instant gratification?

That year I made a couple of hundred dollars, but the following year I made an amount of money very close to what I was earning at my crappy call center job, a job that was literally making me sick. I was watching my wages and benefits decline at my ‘real’ job, and seeing this seemingly endless vista of opportunity open up before me at my addictive hobby.

What would you do?

After having an apparent heart attack at my call center cubicle (hey, spend eight years plugged in to a headset while your pay decreases and you aren’t allow to pee on the clock and see how YOU feel), I decided to move to writing full-time for the internet.

It wasn’t that brave of a decision—if I’d stayed at the call center, I would have been fired in short order anyway for exceeding my allotted time-off on account of my chest pain issue. Plus, the business failed later that same year. So one way or the other, my call center career was ending.

Still, it felt at first like I was spreading my wings and flying into some brave new digital world.

Money for writing! And I could work in my jammies.

I was just like that guy in Avatar. Sort of. Only totally different.

All That Glisters

Back in those intoxicating early days, not that many people were writing online for money. Lots of individuals were slapping up websites with an eye to getting rich on the web through affliliate marketing, which isn’t really the same thing as writing at all, and many of them didn’t like to write and were willing to pay people like me to do it for them.

For over a year I had no trouble picking up fun projects on job boards, and I also posted articles on several revenue sharing sites so I could refer prospective freelance clients to my work. Most people treated me with respect and I mostly took on projects I liked. Compared to call center work this was wonderful stuff.

But by late 2009 the number of people trying to make money this way had skyrocketed to the point that the net was starting to feel like one of those ugly Gold Rush towns of the 19th century. Everybody was packing. Everybody wanted to get rich quick.

Anybody would steal your stuff if you so much as turned your back. Everybody knew the absolute sure-fire formula for making the maximum amount of money fast—and would gladly hook you up to their secret, for a price. Everybody was ready and anxious to explain why you were a loser and they were smart. Clients got more and more manipulative and cheap. Everybody was getting, well, mean.

The money you could make at the job boards started to plummet. Work that paid less than a penny per word began to get hundreds of applicants, and not all of them were in India, either—many were in the U.S. At the same time, Google and other search engines began to focus on finding ways to weed out horrible content, because suddenly the net was saturated with it.

Everybody who could get to a keyboard seemed to be trying to turn their typing into instant money.

Enter the Dragon

Here’s where the drug dealer suddenly appears and ratchets up the stakes.

Corporate content farms began to spring up all over the net, leaving the job boards and the individual entrepreneurs to squabble over who gets to keep the pennies.

To work for a content farm, you have to apply much like you would for a regular job, but of course there are no benefits and no set rates or wages.

On the up side, you can work as little or as much as you want. On the down side, you really have no bargaining power whatsoever, and they own ALL the rights to the content you produce.

Not that you would want the rights to that content. Most of it is pretty dry—more akin to technical writing than creative writing or popular articles. Still, at one to three cents per word (give or take, depending on the site) it’s not really the opportunity of a lifetime.

When I was in college in the late 1970s, creative writing majors picked up 2 cents per word writing for True Confessions rags and that was considered bad money even then, but at least it would keep you in Mac and Cheese. Here we are over 40 years later and the pay has gone down. Yikes.

My Writing Life Today

I soldier on. Why? Because I live in Michigan and CAN’T GET A JOB. The call center work I did for eight years is now farmed out as subcontract or temp work—the only expanding call center in this area today is a company that does medical collections. It’s a sweatshop, a boiler room, and it’s hard to get in, and if you do get in you spend all day dunning people with cancer and terminal illnesses for their insurance co-pay money, which of course they don’t have, because they have cancer and they live in the U.S.

So… things have changed in the job market, and online too.

Why should corporations hire back anybody at all when they can get the same work done by freelancers who carry all their own expenses and all their own risks, and all for pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of hiring a full time employee?

The answer is, there is no reason to hire real employees.

So the Gold Rush days of 2007 have turned into the Digital Feudalism of 2010. I feel kind of bad for my part in helping this era arrive, but then, like everybody else I know, I was just trying to keep the electricity on and food in the cupboard. Still, look where it led.

Work is Not Only About Money

Lately an idea has taken hold in the U.S. that any unemployed person should take any job available no matter what that job is, or else that person is a lazy, selfish slob.

Seriously?

The two expanding industries in the city where I currently live are the medical collections call center and a local slaughterhouse.

These are not places I want to work. I’ll be honest: I’m not even trying to get a job at the medical collections call center OR at the slaughterhouse.

In fact, if someone came to my door today and begged me to take a job at either place I’d tell that person to get away from me.

The truth is that, at 57, they’d not likely hire me even if I did want one of those jobs, but I don’t want one, so it works out. Sort of.

It’s not that I think I’m too good for these jobs. It’s that I think these jobs are, well…evil.

There I said it.

Here’s what I do think:

Just because someone will pay you to do something doesn’t mean it’s a thing worth doing, and I would actually extend that to the written word at this point.

Just because you can drum up a bit of cash typing online doesn’t make you a writer, and just because you can’t drum up a bunch of cash typing online doesn’t make you NOT a writer.

When are we going to start caring about the quality of what we do and get off the almightly dollar?

Full Circle

People have to eat somehow. I know this. But this scrabbling for pennies on the net has made the net a much uglier place. Some major concerns are now frantically unloading their revenue-sharing sites as fast as they can—Associated Content is the latest casualty. E-How is another.

Since digital devices like the iPad are now making under-the-table deals that in effect filter content and exclude these kinds of sites, I expect that trend will escalate. People do not want to read 98% of this ‘content’. The net is completely saturated at this point. Readers don’t care about net neutrality so much as they care about not belng buried in spam and nonsense. Is that harsh? It’s what’s happening.

As a direct result of this changing scene, several of the revenue sharing sites I once wrote for and enjoyed have gotten very ugly and very desperate to squeeze more money out of…out of what? What exactly? Who knows—but the desperation is palpable and it’s not fun. My point is, the business model of revenue sharing is tanking fast, and it’s because of the relentless focus on profitability at the expense of actual writing, and what is the response to this crisis?

More relentless pursuit of profitabilty. Do the same thing harder and harder.

Hello?

At the same time that revenue sharing is getting squeezed hard by search engine changes, the content farms are being deluged with applications, just swamped with them. People who once wrote for major publications are falling all over each other for the opportunity to explain where to find the whozamacallit on a flux capacitor for the grand sum of two cents a word—and they are getting turned down.

“I’m sorry Mr. Shakespeare, but we’ve been overwhelmed with applications and although your resume is impressive, we cannot invite you onto our team at this point in time.”

Back at the job boards, corporations are pushing out individual entrepreneurs by posting hourly subcontract projects at hideous wages. I NEVER work for hourly wages for myself because it’s suicide—that’s a different article, but it is honestly the worst thing you can do—but now hourly work is mostly all there is at the job boards, and it’s all corporate.

Recently, someone I respect kind of blasted me for getting rich here at Eye on Life because I shared a link to something I wrote that I thought would interest him. I didn’t do this to promote myself. I really thought he’d be interested. Wow, was I wrong.

Newsflash: I don’t write for Eye on Life to get rich, I write for Eye on Life because it’s one of the few places I actually CAN write, as in real writing, as in, I can say what is really in my head and heart without wondering if every preposition is properly monetized. And the design and production values are stellar.

Money? I have made, all told, less than $10 here all year.

I will keep writing here as long as they want me, because it’s what I care about and what I want to do.

As for the the rest of the net, I’ve pulled back. I write for one content farm, because, like eveyone else, I need to eat. I don’t spend tons of hours there because it’s depressing, but at least I can contribute financially to our household as a result.

At the same time, I’m working more on creative pieces and longer pieces for no money—just like I have done my entire writing life before the net—because for me, that’s what writing is.

Writing has NEVER been a good way to get rich—Poe, Lovecraft, and tons of other famous writers died in poverty—but for some reason lots people (who are not writers) have always assumed that good writing = big money. It didn’t then and it doesn’t now, not necessarily.

Writers write because, um, because they write.

Seriously, that’s the big secret to writing. Write because it’s what you do no matter what. When I was teaching, people used to ask me, “How do I become a writer?” and my answer was always, “Start writing and don’t stop. Boom, you’re a writer!”

It’s not meant to be a flip answer, just the plain truth. Believe me, agree or don’t, I don’t really care. What matters is that I know who I am and what I’m doing, and basically, I do know. I’ve known for quite awhile.

It’s getting really, really ugly in cyberspace.

And I’ve had about enough.