Is the content business in trouble?
Posted: Thu Jun 13, 2013 8:35 pm
In April and May, I priced my articles at $19 each and sold about one article every 2 days. In June, I sold nothing in the first 7 days. I wondered if my prices were too high and lowered them to $14. I only sold 2 articles after that.
I've been wondering if it is just me or if other people are having trouble selling articles, too. To check, I've been keeping an eye on the list of recent document sales for a couple of days. This list used to move very fast before – lots of sales all the time. Today, the bottom half on the list is full of articles from 06/12/2013 (two days ago). It appears that sales on Constant Content have dropped to perhaps 10% of what they were a month ago.
Am I reading the situation correctly? Why are people not buying from Constant Content anymore? Is the whole content writing market ending?
Does this have something to do with the new Google Penguin 4/Penguin 2 algorithm that was released on May 22? Sales seem to have dropped right after that. Perhaps many of Constant Content's customers were badly hit by Google's new algorithm and they can no longer afford to buy content? Or could they perhaps feel that the kind of articles they find on Constant Content don't satisfy the needs of Google's new search algorithms?
Constant Content's Private Requests part seems to be doing very well. Perhaps after Penguin 4, website owners just want a couple of articles from Private Requests to put on their product pages and nothing more? Perhaps they no longer feel that buying articles to fill their blogs with makes no sense anymore?
Constant Content has been running smoothly, though. I get all my article submissions accepted in five days or so.
Does anyone have any idea if the content writing business is in trouble in general (or Content Constant in particular)? Authorities like Content Marketing Institute seem to say that good content is more important now (after Penguin 4) than ever. Why are things slowing down on Constant Content then?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Srinivasayyar
June 15 – I just checked on Alexa.com to see how Constant Content's traffic was. It shows that Constant Content has seen its visitor traffic fall by 31.86% over the past month by 23.91% over the past 3 months. The graph shows that at this time last year, traffic was very high. Could Penguin be responsible for this? Fortunately, things seem to be looking up. Traffic has risen by 20% over the past week. Perhaps things will improve.
I've been wondering if it is just me or if other people are having trouble selling articles, too. To check, I've been keeping an eye on the list of recent document sales for a couple of days. This list used to move very fast before – lots of sales all the time. Today, the bottom half on the list is full of articles from 06/12/2013 (two days ago). It appears that sales on Constant Content have dropped to perhaps 10% of what they were a month ago.
Am I reading the situation correctly? Why are people not buying from Constant Content anymore? Is the whole content writing market ending?
Does this have something to do with the new Google Penguin 4/Penguin 2 algorithm that was released on May 22? Sales seem to have dropped right after that. Perhaps many of Constant Content's customers were badly hit by Google's new algorithm and they can no longer afford to buy content? Or could they perhaps feel that the kind of articles they find on Constant Content don't satisfy the needs of Google's new search algorithms?
Constant Content's Private Requests part seems to be doing very well. Perhaps after Penguin 4, website owners just want a couple of articles from Private Requests to put on their product pages and nothing more? Perhaps they no longer feel that buying articles to fill their blogs with makes no sense anymore?
Constant Content has been running smoothly, though. I get all my article submissions accepted in five days or so.
Does anyone have any idea if the content writing business is in trouble in general (or Content Constant in particular)? Authorities like Content Marketing Institute seem to say that good content is more important now (after Penguin 4) than ever. Why are things slowing down on Constant Content then?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Srinivasayyar
June 15 – I just checked on Alexa.com to see how Constant Content's traffic was. It shows that Constant Content has seen its visitor traffic fall by 31.86% over the past month by 23.91% over the past 3 months. The graph shows that at this time last year, traffic was very high. Could Penguin be responsible for this? Fortunately, things seem to be looking up. Traffic has risen by 20% over the past week. Perhaps things will improve.
The list of recent document sales also isn't ALL of the sales that happen at this site, though it it a good indicator if things are a little bit slower private requests/catalog sales, which sometimes they are.