image via

Over the last few months I kept bumping into a “challenge” on Triond: people are either trying to get 1,000 articles by the end of 2010 or make $1,000 in any given 30 days (there are at least two versions of the challenge).  Judging by my not-so-good experience with Triond, to say the least, I might say these people are fucking nuts.

I almost shat a brick when I heard of writing 1,000 articles for Triond. My ever best paid article with them is some fashion writeup that brought me a whopping *drumrolls* $0.93 in one and a half years. Yes, that’s 93 cents, I shit you not. Multiply that by 1,000 and my top earnings would be $930 for 1,000 articles. Thanks but no, thanks, I can sell them on DP for $3-4,000.

The second version is even scarier. At a pay rate of $1-$2 per 1,000 views, you’d need 1,000,000 hits per month for the $1,000 mark. And no, traffic exchanges don’t count. So good luck spamming your friends on FB–1M hits in a month is a lot of traffic!

I’d rather post 1K articles on my own sites or even sell them for hard, cold cash. So no, I’ll pass this challenge.

There will be most likely no major fuss for the great majority of Triond publishers. Average articles get less than 100 views per month and, with the 50/50 revenue sharing split, you’d be lucky to get one click per month. It could, however, scale if you have tons of content published.

It has been said that Adsense pays better than YPN lately. Let’s just wait and see how Google will evaluate Triond’s pages and how high the eCPM will get.

Huge market. There is an insanely high demand for keyword rich articles that bring no value to the site other than building organic traffic. I know of a company that delivers over 1,000 such articles daily, 20 days a month. Getting customers is really a piece of cake, just log on DP and you’ll find zillions of requests in the BST thread.

It’s easy to be the best. Well, not the best, but, if you can deliver better content than this piece of dung, then you’ll get orders. There are hardly any big fish to compete against in this market.

Easy to write. I can’t vouch for other writers, but it doesn’t take me more than 20 minutes to come up with a 500 word article on mostly any topic. I hardly need any research and there can usually be no copyright issue related to rewriting other articles, since there is no branded idea to be presented. If I were to move on the next level, I’d probably have to work tenfold for 5-6 times the pay. No, thank you.

Hardly any responsibility for ideas. When writing low end content, you generally don’t have to put in your own thoughts and personal experience. The articles are generally in the line of ”what product X is”, ”how to install Y” or ”how to use product Z to achieve W”. There is hardly any need for analysis, personal inputs, hence you can’t be held accountable for what you wrote. You just sell the articles and forget about them.

Selling cheap content has to do with the economy of the country you’re from. If stacking plates at McDonald’s gets you more per hour than this, writing for pennies will probably not pay up. Where I come from, delivering 20-30 such articles per day brings me about 6-7 times the national net average wage, while still allowing me to work on personal projects.

Cheap content shouldn’t be regarded as a quality over quantity dispute. It simply addresses a different share of the market. We don’t do press releases, copy letters or magazine editorials. Many of us choose to stay in this market because we want to, not because we cannot move to the next level. And such is the case in all industries: you don’t see Renault building Porsches just because the assembly time is about the same, but the latter sells for ten times the price, do you?