by Rachel Smith
04 November 2015
I’ve been asked to pitch to a very well-known high traffic interiors website which claims to have 1.3 million readers per month. The only thing is, the pay. I nearly fell off my chair when I got the rates via email – it ranges from $50/piece right up to a super generous (not) $110 for a piece with interview, and around the same if you provide a piece with pix. I have no idea how anyone writes for this money and still manages to eat. But, you do it under your profile and if you blog as well in that genre, I suppose it is profile-raising to a degree and could result in cross-promotional traffic. No guarantees though. The work’s regular but would I be mad to do it? Really need a second opinion. A
This is such a personal thing. It really depends on where you’re at in your career, how much well paid work you have, whether you’re gunning to build your profile, whether the ‘exposure’ is worth it to you … and so on. Me? I would struggle. But then I’m used to being paid between 60-80c/word for print and when offered less for digital, I fight tooth and nail for more. I suppose $50 per article is better than you’d get at HuffPo (where they offer zero bucks and hold up the ‘Exposure, yay!’ flag like it’s the journalistic holy grail) but it’s still crap money.
(Exposure as payment is probably a whole other blog post – and in the meantime, this from The Oatmeal captures it pretty much perfectly).
So what do we do? Consider such offers as hourly rates? Some freelancers do. So if, say, you were offered $140 for an article and it’s 500 words and you can knock it over in 2 hours, that’s crap in word rate terms (if that’s what you’re used to) but in hourly rate terms, not so bad (especially if you work fast and efficiently). $50/piece might also be acceptable if it was previously published content and they wanted to re-run it on their site – but I’m guessing they want brand new content.
Sites like the one you describe are probably updating 10-15 times a day and so you’re just part of one big content machine, expected to churn out words that will be eaten up fast by a ravenous audience and forgotten just as quickly. Sure, they’ll stay on the site and the backlinks to you are great for your blog’s Google ranking (if you blog), but do you have the time? Will you resent it? Will you wish you could use that time to find work that pays you what you’re really worth? These are all good questions to be asking. Also to consider: in taking such rates, are you helping to perpetuate an industry that devalues writers and good writing? Of course. No doubt. The sad thing is, my wish that we’d all collectively stand up and tell these sites to stuff it until they pay more is just a pipe dream – there’ll always be people willing to write for peanuts, and sites willing to hire them as long as they can vaguely string a sentence together.
The good news is, there ARE digital agencies and sites out there who do pay okay rates. There are editors and clients with budgets who value good writing and are willing to pay for it. You just have to hold out for these jobs and when they come along, know your worth and negotiate to get it. You’ll not only be able to sleep at night but you’ll also be doing your colleagues a big favour, too. You can (and should) also go back to the $50-an-article sites and challenge their rates. In fact, we all should.
Agree or disagree? Have you worked for sites that pay peanuts and offer exposure? Have you challenged sites like these on their rates? Do you have a standard response to offers like these – even with big, well-known sites? We’d love to hear your experiences – good and bad – in the comments.
Agree agree agree. One hundred times agree.
Especially about this:
“Also to consider: in taking such rates, are you helping to perpetuate an industry that devalues writers and good writing? Of course. No doubt.”
Thanks Sue. I wish so many of us weren’t put in the position of having to make that choice! :-\
This is so pertinent to me. Just yesterday I was offered quite a bit of work for just over half my normal hourly rate. My husband suggested that if I didn’t have something that paid better to do, not taking the work would end up costing me the rate I’d been offered. So low paying work is better than no paying work, if effect. But for all the reasons you state above, it still doesn’t sit right. However, the work will be interesting and given they are a start up, I know that what I’m being offered is really all that’s in the budget; they aren’t trying to dupe me, they just don’t have any more to offer. So the quandary continues!
Yes – you can’t deny that some work is better than no work and if you’re in that position, it’s very hard to know what to do. I totally get it.