That's still true. Writing for the web is generally a low-paying job. It would be even lower if the media properties went out of business.

You'd be surprised. Actually, there are tons of freelancing jobs that pay you just for this.

Not to mention that the "author of this piece" has been making money for 10 years now, and getting paid, thank you, for doing his thing.

So maybe it's not him, but you that don't understand what's available?

You're getting paid with advertising dollars for posting on hacker news?

Surprise: you (and all the other posters on hacker news) are the content producers I love. We've never been paid for this nonsense, and I doubt we ever will be. Won't stop us posting though. I'm really not that worried if buzzfeed and medium go under.

I'm surprised that so many people are happy to describe themselves as content creators. It's an admission that what you create is generic content for some platform to wrap in ads. It's a type of self-commoditization.

Assuming everything else remained constant. I've seen creators comment that adding sponsorships really hurt their growth numbers.

And most of what people write in order to get ad revenue is pure garbage. And even the stuff that isn't garbage is constrained by what advertisers approve of.

Of course he is, that's the whole point of writing.

I agree with you right up to the second comma.

Youtube was a smash success well before it started giving youtubers advertising money. Open source software has been around way longer than paypal donations. YMTD, Newgrounds and 4Chan have never paid their content creators. Stuff like the jargon file, zombocom, quakenet and OCAU has been around since forever, running on donations from users or the willing pockets of their creators. Wikipedia editors get paid in warm fuzzies.

People are basically creative and giving, and like making content for others to enjoy. The internet was hardly languishing from a lack of content before advertising started to seriously make inroads.

Hell, when it comes to technical advice, half the best content is technical posts made before 2006 on random forums all across the internet by people who just want to be helpful. No forums user has ever gone "I'd like to post a full teardown of my favorate motorbike engine, but no one will pay me so I guess that the opportunity cost would be wasted, maybe I'll go spend 5 hours on mechanical turk instead".

On the other hand, sites like wired, forbes, the wall street journal and time have spiraled into a cesspool of clickbait titles, poorly researched articles and thinly veiled native advertising pieces since they moved their business models from mostly paper mags to mostly online advertising.

I reject utterly the notion that the web is improved by paying people to make internet-centric content, and would shed no tears whatsoever if I saw all monitisation-driven content creators leave the web for whatever they feel are greener pastures.

I'm not sure. the main problem with the net isn't that you can't make enough for good writing using ads - but that it's extremely easy to copy someone else's hard work, maybe package with clickbait and make more money.

And i suspect that even when money would be involved, it may still make sense to create content using someone else's hard work.

True, there are actually some real writers worth reading on substack, but imo, not enough of them, and even less of them that I would be willing to pay to read - heck, I won't even pay to read a newspaper online anywhere as you can get it almost all for free someplace else with a few clicks.

Seems like an attempt to monetize free blogs, problem is, there are still plenty of other free blogs to read - they haven't gone away.

The author gets to choose where their writing get syndicated to. It’s a conscious decision, for whatever reason they make it: money, principle, or just good friends with the owner. So I don’t think it’s disingenuous to point it that they have chosen to write regularly for UNZ.

I haven’t judged UNZ either way, I’m just providing a citation for the claim that Jonathan Cook writes fro UNZ. Make of that information what you want.

Exactly. There’s no issue.

> There's a reason you don't see a Patreon or other way of paying for the vast majority of clickbait content.

The vast majority of content, clickbait or not doesn’t have a patreon to begin with. Most patreon have social media presence which includes ads. Sounds like the worst of both worlds.

$1 per acticle? I know the articles on the site (http://www.minimotherboard.com/, via a comment) are short and not really original content, but assuming he's spending even 10 minutes per post, he could be earning more working the drive-thru at McDonald's. I suppose he's agreed to it, and it's not your fault he's undervaluing his work, but that strikes me as insultingly low. I really feel for the guy if he's been forced into writing for what is essentially table scraps.

I've contemplated this kind of thing, but it feels like panhandling, and I'm reluctant to go there. I would do it if I thought I could do so tastefully and respectfully.

I'm a (non-tech-related) "content producer," and I absolutely refuse to put up ads or be a shill or "native advertiser." Instead, I wrote a book, and if people want to support what I do, they can buy it. It's not enough to be a day job, but it probably could be with day-job levels of time and effort, and my "content consumers" appreciate my integrity.

Certainly not by all means. But it isn't unreasonable to expect that if people gain value from something you create, some of that value accrues to you as the creator.

I make most of my living as a freelance writer, but I just charge other people to write the content they can't or won't.

There is also another problem here: the market doesn't typically incentivize the sort of content we'd like to see created. Long form investigative journalism is hugely expensive, and in a world awash with free content, few people think they should have to pay for it. But do we really want to see that sort of content go away?

I don't mind paying content creators directly. I do mind allowing them to commodify parts of my mind.

Really interesting point, and I hope it works for them.

The freelancers can just write under their own names. Mathematically, people who can create substantial value by creating high-end content who are also CEOs must logically be a subset of the total population of folks who can create valuable high-end content. So you would expect at least some market for high-end content creation, but nothing like that actually exists.

Right now there are a handful of individuals who have landed one-off gigs doing this, but there isn't any sort of marketplace.

As someone very close to this area, I seriously question this. Yes, there are very low-rent content mills with material being cranked out by people who are being paid pennies per word. But serious freelance writing being commissioned by many corporations (where the pay is more in line with $1/word) are not going to be replaced by ChatGPT anytime soon. The writers may use ChatGPT as an assistant and perhaps rates will decline further over time but this basically falls in the same category as we won't need programmers any longer.

Maybe? But now you're in the category of AI will take all the jobs.