Horror Stories from a Content Mill

John Edwards
Sep 7, 2018 · 7 min read

It’s a day ending in “y”, which means that it’s time for Deadspin to publish yet another article about sports writing websites who refuse to pay their writers fair wages (or anything, for that matter). Time and time again, I’ve seen these high-profile exposés on these big sites that fail to pay their writers fairly — FanSided & SBNation among others — but I have yet to see anyone write anything on the smaller sites that engage in this manner of predatory behavior. For every writer earning nothing on SBNation, there are ten more earning nothing for other sites too, in possibly worse circumstances. I know, because I was one of those writers.

I won’t claim that this article is high journalism. I haven’t gone around to grab quotes from people who work at the site that I used to write for (not that I have any intention of talking to some of these people ever again, nor would they feel terribly inclined to talk to me). I’ll leave the site anonymous, as naming it would not make a significant difference, though many of you who follow me or have worked with me can probably guess which site I’m talking about. I’ll also leave quotes from others about the site as anonymous — but rest assured, I’m not alone in having experienced this.


Let’s start by defining what a “content mill” is. There’s a lot of money in internet advertising, even as ad-blockers see increased use, and everybody wants a piece of that pie. Many prominent sites operate on a quality over quantity philosophy — perhaps they publish ten articles in a day, but they’re good, well-researched articles featuring original content. Other sites, such as SBNation and FanSided, fall on the other side of the spectrum — producing a lot of content that is not necessarily high quality.

From the perspective of a writer, the latter approach is extremely problematic. Producing as much written content as these writers do requires an extraordinary amount of man hours. Many of the people who manage content on these site are not provided with the financial means to adequately and fairly compensate writers for their work with this content — some folks paid pennies if at all for providing content for these sites. There could never be the means to adequately compensate writers for their output, and hence, these sites operate in a legal-gray-area.

Many of these writers are exploited through their inexperience with the industry. When I first began to write for The Site, I was told that I would be doing this for experience and exposure, not for pay — it would be laughable that someone so fresh in the industry would be paid for their work. In hindsight, this notion is ridiculous — just because you’ve never flipped burgers at McDonalds before doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve to be paid while working there — but it worked on me. Besides, I wasn’t concerned with being paid, I was just happy to pursue this as a hobby.

This mentality is extraordinarily damaging to the industry. It is a seeping, infected wound in the side of sportswriting. Considering how much of the content for these sites is simply repeating the latest twitter news or restating another article, it does not require an extraordinary degree of technical skill to produce the majority of content for these sites — hence, someone may feel comfortable doing this simply “as a hobby” — accepting low pay in exchange for the opportunity to perform this service.

But accepting lower levels of pay for similar services weakens the demanded price for sports writing across the industry —if somebody is willing to do your job for free, you can’t ask for as much. Sportswriting is not a hobby — it is not putting together toy trains in your basement, it is not collecting baseball cards. Sportswriting is providing someone else with editorial content that they can use to make money. Treating sportswriting as a hobby is selling yourself short, and allowing someone else to profit off of what you consider to be a hobby (something you are willing to do for free, and invest time, energy, and resources into). Sportswriting is never a hobby, because somebody is making money off it — allowing someone else to profit and not yourself is selling yourself and the industry short.


Who’s profiting off of it? Sometimes it’s a Fortune 500 company. Sometimes it’s just some college kid. For me, it was just some college kid. That was a part of the appeal, I suppose — the site was run by a bunch of college kids, it had a bunch of college kids for writers and editors, and it had this laid-back-millennial vibe. Ignoring the fact that I was writing so much without getting paid, I enjoyed it — shooting the shit in group chats about baseball, making friends and cracking jokes, it was nice to reach out and communicate with other people!

But there were parts of it that unnerved me. For starters, that same college kid who ran the site could be quite abrasive at times. He talked shit about almost every single writer who left, to the degree that it felt personal. When I ended up leaving after a year, predictably enough, a friend sent me messages of the head of the site saying certain uncomfortable things about me as well.

He was also insistent upon having us use our social media accounts to retweet and like every single tweet sent from the official account for The Site. He rallied on and on about engagement, despite the fact that having writers do all these things did not significantly impact our engagement numbers, only inflated them. To this day, if you clicked on any tweet from the official account of The Site, you’d find that it has something like 10 RTs, 20 likes, and almost all of them from site writers and editors — with almost no actual engagement.

I have other stories as well. The Site managed to find some exploitative, TMZ-esque scoop about a prominent basketball personality, picked it up, and broadcasted it as far as possible — to the point that someone ended up asking a question about it to the son of said basketball personality during a press conference. Reportedly, the writer who originally picked up the scoop was pushed aside, as the head of the site apparently insisted on writing the article for himself. This was particularly scummy, as when I wrote for The Site, we received no compensation, but after I left, The Site began compensating writers (at the paltry rate of ~$1 dollar per thousand clicks — an almost impossible margin to reach given the traffic that reached The Site). For such a big scoop, the writer was pushed aside and lost out. Later, the head of The Site started bragging about how only his article received national attention, as opposed to the many articles that The Site pushed out every day.

I heard from another writer that this guy commandeered everyone’s first “paycheck” at the site, though I might question if there really was a paycheck there. Any old articles from writers who left were not deleted, but shifted to have a single generic author — so there’s no proof left on the site that I, or many other former writers, even wrote for the site.

Former editors sunk in their time, energy and money into the site — one former editor told me that he ended up spending over $150 dollars of his own money on the site, without reimbursement.

In essence, the site was constructed to have writers working for as little as possible, producing as much content as possible, leaving most of whatever money the site earned to the costs of running the site or to the head of the site. I’ll give the head of The Site the benefit of the doubt here and say that what little money the site made went exclusively to the costs of running the site, as I don’t know one way or the other — but even in the best possible interpretation of these events, writers were (and still are being) exploited and lied to in order to mass produce content.


I know I wasn’t the only one. I know that there are other sites out there that behave in a similar manner, sites that will never receive the attention that SBNation or Fansided receive for operating with the same scummy practices on smaller scales, writers whose stories won’t be heard, creating content for people who can’t or won’t pay them fairly. It’s almost an epidemic.

But it’s also a rite of passage — almost every big writer who came up through the age of internet got their start on one of these sites. I’m no Grant Brisbee, but at the same time I am where I am today because I got started writing on the internet. In the sense that minor league players are expected to struggle financially as a rite of passage before reaching the majors, so too do writers struggle with earning fair payment for their work. I know! I have been there, as countless others have been as well.

But just because it’s a “rite of passage” or because it is “tradition” does not mean that it’s okay (or legal, for that matter). Writers deserve fair payment for their work. It’s appropriate to scale payment in terms of experience and quality, but that scale should never reach below at least minimum wage.

If you are writing for somebody else, and you are not being compensated fairly, you are entitled to far better. Exposure and experience will never pay your bills, and when it came to getting somewhere in the industry, for me, it was not on the back of having written for a content mill, it was that I had developed my voice and writing — something that does not require writing for someone else. Do yourself and you fellow writers a favor, and work only for fair pay.

Baseball, hot takes, baseball. Not-so-mysterious man of mystery. Mets fan, writer. Sporting News contributor.

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