IS IT JUST ME, OR IS IT THEM?

Ahh.. here we are, back to the topic of writing articles for money.

I have been doing this for a couple years now and for the most part things have been good. Even in the bad times things were at least decent. These days however it seems to me that the status of the industry (if you can call it that) is on the downfall.

Don't just take my word for it. See how your experiences compare to mine. Check this out:

• For the last two months I have seen the most consistent site that I have worked for go from having work nearly everyday to having work once every 5 days (if that).
• Two of my "back-up" sites, sites that I work for when my main site has no articles to write, are rejecting about 95% of the work I do. This can't be right. For one, they always accepted my work before. And for two I know the work that I submit is not "poor quality". Sometimes I wonder if they are rejecting my work just so they do not have to pay out and the requester is still keeping the articles.  Wish there was an easy way to check this.
• The work requirements for certain tiers of compensation have increased. For example: The site might list a certain category as 300 words which is supposed to have work averaging about 300 words. But when you read the details for the requested job, they ask for "more than 470 words". Essentially they are getting a 500 or more word piece for the 300 word price. 

While some might just say that I am nit-picking or being petty about these work requirements. I can see how it would look that way. But let me say that for someone who has worked in this "industry" for multiple years now, it was not like this before. At least not for the sites that I would have considered "good". I only signed up with those kinds of sites. I never went with the cheaper ones out there. If you have been doing this for a while you know what I mean. There are good and bad content sites.

Oh yea.. and today I checked a couple of the reviews for work that I did last night. I was working for a site called "Article Teller" . Not the greatest, but there are worse sites out there. I only did two articles for them last night because I did not want to invest too much of my time in something that I was not sure about. Even though I have worked with them a lot in the past, some of their clients have been rather shady lately. And I fear that I ran into another one last night.

When checking over the reviews of my work from yesterday I saw that both of my articles were rejected! Now, I am not a prick. If my work was rejected for legitimate reasons I can take it. I have no problem revising my work to meet a clients standards or requests. All they need to do is tell me what they want. But when I clicked on the "notes" to see why it was turned down I was shocked to see, "rejected for English too poor for peer review process".

I had to laugh when I read that. Well, then I was mad. "Thank god I did not spend too much time doing work for them yesterday" I thought to myself. So of course I wrote a note to the "requester" asking for more specific detail on why my article was rejected. I said that I could not accept "English too poor" as a reason. Not when I see how people destroy the language every day on the net.

I know this has been a bit on the rant side of things but I had to blow off some steam. I must also apologize to my readers for most of my posts being about this topic of late. It is just that I have been doing this type of work for a while now and seeing the industry fall apart before my eyes is disheartening. Especially when I was making decent money for a while there when the work was consistent. Now I make next to nothing. It is truly sad. I promise, I will start writing about other things soon enough... :)

Thanks for your patience and understanding!