The life of the writer, so glamorous, so free and so unbridled by the awful banality of the 9–5 office job. You’re your own boss — not because you’re unmanageable — but because your artistic talents cannot afford to be constrained! You’re a free spirit destined for greatness. Greatness not for your own personal fame and fortunes (those are “the wrong reasons”) but because you are gifted and the world stands to benefit a great many things from your unquestionably unique perspective.
Ditching the cliché’d coffee shop — nothing to do with the overpriced coffee but everything to do with getting in ‘the zone’ — you finally start busting out those ground-breaking, earth-shattering real truths.
But who’s paying?
After months/years of this you wake up to the fact that surviving on breadcrumbs and instant noodles is far from the imagined life of the artíst, far less glamorous and even further less lucrative. You realise that your ‘real truths’ aren’t bringing home the bacon and upon taking stock of the real money making options for a writer online you’re hit with the reality that it’s down to 2.
a) Technical copywriting — Churning out word-salad known as “reports and analysis” on literally the most boring industries you can imagine that will never be read by anyone other than yourself and maybe the client.
b) Clickbait garbage — Vying for a glimpse of traffic in an attempt to gain pennies on the dollar from the literal shitfactory that is buzzfeed and co.
So whatdyado?
Thankfully, with the help of a lot of monkeys and typewriters, the Internet provides the answer. These monkeys aren’t bashing out Shakespeare though, they’re coding. And their typewriters? Actual computers.
Over the past couple of years there has been a development in the online content industry towards individuals earning their own lunch money through publishing on these new-age platforms promising money for likes. The soon-to-be-deceased Steemit (link to 70% employee cut) for example lured people in with their $400 “top recommended” posts but this only acted to add logs to the flaming pile of clickbait garbage that is the current state of the online content industry. Medium has some great articles but with only a tiny minority of writers actually getting any money out of it. So now what?
Alternatives? Solutions? Magic beans?
Man cannot survive on magic beans alone. In the gloom of despair we find ourselves staring face-to-face with a more realistic solution to this issue, something that at its core is all about quality with the belief the single defining factor in whether something should be believed, monetised or even seen online is its quality. Anti-clickbait, garbage, ads and plagiarism mechanisms + a way to actually make money — all in the one place. It’s called Primas and it’s pretty cool.
