Reasonable value for our 35% fee?

[ThatWordChick]

While I'm grateful to have a forum to sell articles, I'm not really happy with the level of customer service on the site.

In my opinion, articles should take -no longer- than five days to approve, period. Waiting 2-3 weeks to get an editor to look over a 500 word piece is insane, especially when the piece is for a request with a deadline. No, turning in something two days before the deadline and expecting it to be edited in time isn't reasonable, but waiting for the better part of a month isn't either. If there's too many submissions, they need to hire more editors or close down new applications until they get it under control. At the VERY least I expect timely updates about where I stand in line so I can adjust my efforts elsewhere accordingly.

In addition, I expect proactive efforts to prevent and shut down theft for the chunk CC takes out of my bottom line. Why should I be subjected to scrutiny so intense that it requires "industrial strength" plagiarism checkers and another 2-3 week wait for a misplaced comma when there are so many incidences of content theft happening daily, right under the site's nose? You are sending a loud and clear message that clients mean everything and writers mean nothing, and in the long run that isn't going to serve to do anything but fill this place up with English-mangling foreign sweatshops of writers - and nothing will scare off solid clients faster than a body of THAT sort of work. You should be running every active piece through a plagiarism checker on OUR side at least once a week to prevent the merry embezzling of our content en masse. If I have to come to you to tell you that my work has clearly been stolen off of your site, I'm sorry but I don't feel that you deserve to get a cut of my sales. Enhance your security or be more proactive for the bread-and-butter that your writers are, CC. It's the right thing to do.

[jellygator]

I have evaluated the things you are wondering about, too. You may dislike what I am about to say, but here goes:

I think there have been 10 people who hit the Google Plus button and a total of 67 who have "liked" CC on Facebook. The Recently Sold content page that updates daily shows 10-20 sales per day, and often the same person has purchased multiple articles on a similar topic. I'd guess perhaps 3-8 customers a day on average make purchases.

Since it may not show them all, I'll speculate that 25 articles a day may be sold. The majority of these sales are between $30 and $50, so we'll say that $40 is the average. That means CC's 35% totals are $40 x .35 = $14. At what I believe is a generous estimate of 30 sales per day, CC is bringing in about $350 a day, or $10,500 per month. If there are 2 full time editors (I believe there are), and each is earning just $15 per hour, about $4,800 is paid out in salary and income tax liability monthly. The remaining $5,400 is what is left for the site owner's salary and profit. The site owner must provide web hosting, article encryption, accurate record-keeping, PayPal costs to administer payroll services, keep the domain name paid up, advertise, provide customer service, file DCMA reports and handle customer violations, and develop the widgets and such that enable us to advertise on the site's behalf easily if we want to make more sales.

I don't think that's unreasonable. I know I don't want to pay more for those services than we already pay, and I believe that this is why other writing sites have such crappy pay for writers. I appreciate having a site where paying customers reliably purchase articles at fair prices. I've tried a few other sites, and I couldn't even contemplate taking the time to write for the kind of money they pay.

Want to see more services for what we pay? Help expand the CC customer base of article buyers.

[Celeste Stewart]

I'm guessing there's much more to CC's cash flow/outflow than what we see on the recently sold list. That list is interesting and helpful in many ways, but it's not a true accounting of CC's profit/loss (nor is it meant to be IMO).

ThatWordChick has a legitimate gripe: writers are CC's customers too and our work needs to be protected from theft. It's a huge challenge --across the Web, not just here -- and CC has been aggressive about staying on top of it. A reminder about how important this issue is to us (and that we are paying a fair amount of our income for services here) may rankle a few feathers (probably because they're on the same page as us and working on it) but it's still important to express these concerns.

In my experience CC is very proactive and our voices are an important part of its success. If we accept rampant content theft without airing our concerns, then we can't complain if CC doesn't do anything about it. A reminder about issues like these is healthy for the long term success of CC in my opinion.

Just an aside: I don't think social media "likes" and "+s" have anything to do with this issue.

Edited to add:
Oh Jelly,....

Want to see more services for what we pay? Help expand the CC customer base of article buyers.

While I get the sentiment, imagine a telephone company, Internet provider, or some other service provider expecting you to find additional customers so that they could provide additional value?

I love CC and am one of its biggest fans. That said, I am paying CC a nice chunk of change to bring buyers to ME, not the other way around. While I often send potential buyers to CC because I believe CC can help when I'm not in a position to, it's not really up to us writers to market the site and expand its customer base. We're already contributing significantly by offering our works 65/35. It's reasonable to expect a good portion of the commission to go toward marketing. That's really what we're paying for as writers here: CC to market our work (and guard it from theft) for us - not the other way around.

[mnicol22]

I love CC and am one of its biggest fans. That said, I am paying CC a nice chunk of change to bring buyers to ME, not the other way around.

I agree with Celeste on this. Think about it from a newbie's realistic perspective: If I had any way of finding new customers, wouldn't I rather work for them directly instead of paying a mediator? Wouldn't you? That's the primary reason that I'm here in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate having an editor catch my silly mistakes and being able to focus solely on writing instead of worrying how I'm going to get my writing out there. I just don't think that anyone would be willing to sacrifice 35% of his income if he had the option to work exclusively with his own customers. Since I can't find my own clientele, then, I am willing to pay CC that amount to do the job for me. Simply put, I'm not in a position to help the site's customer base expand.

I haven't seen any significant income from CC yet - I've only had one sale in two months, but I have dedicated neither the time nor the effort required. No regrets. I was laid off from my day job just before the holidays, so I had the unique chance to spend the entire holiday season with my family and I took it. It was actually the first time in many many years! In any case, I like to see CC like any other job; if you work you will get paid. Every job has its quirks and it's up to you to decide whether it's worth your time.

[Constant]

While I'm grateful to have a forum to sell articles, I'm not really happy with the level of customer service on the site.

In my opinion, articles should take -no longer- than five days to approve, period. Waiting 2-3 weeks to get an editor to look over a 500 word piece is insane, especially when the piece is for a request with a deadline. No, turning in something two days before the deadline and expecting it to be edited in time isn't reasonable, but waiting for the better part of a month isn't either. If there's too many submissions, they need to hire more editors or close down new applications until they get it under control. At the VERY least I expect timely updates about where I stand in line so I can adjust my efforts elsewhere accordingly.

In addition, I expect proactive efforts to prevent and shut down theft for the chunk CC takes out of my bottom line. Why should I be subjected to scrutiny so intense that it requires "industrial strength" plagiarism checkers and another 2-3 week wait for a misplaced comma when there are so many incidences of content theft happening daily, right under the site's nose? You are sending a loud and clear message that clients mean everything and writers mean nothing, and in the long run that isn't going to serve to do anything but fill this place up with English-mangling foreign sweatshops of writers - and nothing will scare off solid clients faster than a body of THAT sort of work. You should be running every active piece through a plagiarism checker on OUR side at least once a week to prevent the merry embezzling of our content en masse. If I have to come to you to tell you that my work has clearly been stolen off of your site, I'm sorry but I don't feel that you deserve to get a cut of my sales. Enhance your security or be more proactive for the bread-and-butter that your writers are, CC. It's the right thing to do.

Thanks for your comments here. I'd like to let you know that all of your concerns are also very important to us, and we absolutely do value our writers. As you said, they are what makes the site.

In regards to the editing process - we have definitely had some hiccups so I can understand where you're coming from. There have been a couple periods in the last year where spikes in submission volumes caught us by surprise and our editorial team was overwhelmed. In each case we've acted as fast as we can to add additional staff so that review times are as fast as possible for both our writers and clients. I can tell you that for all of January 2012, our average review time was between 1-2 days. We're aiming to keep it like that.

We've also been very aggressive with content theft in the last year. Not only have we been consulting with an Online Security Specialist to enhance security, but we've also invested large amounts of developer time to make the previews of articles even more secure. In 2011 we made no fewer than 8 substantial upgrades.

Our policy has always been to support our writers whenever there has been a case of content theft. I know it's extremely frustrating when it does happen (for us too), but I can tell you that when you look at its occurrence vs the overall volume on our site, it is quite rare. In the instance it does happen, we don't stop until the matter is resolved.

We agree that our role is to help our writers sell content and get opportunities to write for our customers. We don't expect writers to promote us, but we do appreciate when they do There's a lot going on behind the scenes at Constant Content that we're doing to try to help our writers sell more and provide greater value to them. These include employing editorial staff, sales reps, running advertisements and also developing the site to be a better and better platform for writers to sell their work.

[jellygator]

Edited to add:
Oh Jelly,....

Want to see more services for what we pay? Help expand the CC customer base of article buyers.

While I get the sentiment, imagine a telephone company, Internet provider, or some other service provider expecting you to find additional customers so that they could provide additional value?

I love CC and am one of its biggest fans. That said, I am paying CC a nice chunk of change to bring buyers to ME, not the other way around. While I often send potential buyers to CC because I believe CC can help when I'm not in a position to, it's not really up to us writers to market the site and expand its customer base. We're already contributing significantly by offering our works 65/35. It's reasonable to expect a good portion of the commission to go toward marketing. That's really what we're paying for as writers here: CC to market our work (and guard it from theft) for us - not the other way around.

I understand your point and completely agree that a good portion of the commissions we pay should go to marketing. At the same time, when I do imagine telephone companies, Internet providers, etc. expecting their customers to expand their customer base to provide additional value, it looks like what I see everywhere:

- Banks offer customers pre-paid Visa cards for referring new clients
- ISPs offer a free month if you refer so many people
- Friends fly free campaigns

This is actually extremely common in business, and businesses promote it because it works to get them more long-term term customers, which increases their revenues, which allows them to expand their operations for their customers' benefit and more profit. The new CC widget serves the same purpose. As writers, we're out there in a lot of areas - blogging, maintaining their own websites, and writing for other companies that have buying customers that CC cannot reach the way a writer may be able to. Together, we have as much power and perhaps MORE credibility than any paid advertising campaigns.

I've run my own company and while the example I posted initially wasn't meant to be all-inclusive or precise, I just do not see where there *can* be a sufficient amount for doing a whole lot more than CC is already doing.

[Celeste Stewart]

Thanks Constant for reassuring ThatWordChick and everyone else about the behind the scenes efforts to keep CC secure and profitable.

Jelly, I totally don't mind promoting CC (and I do! I've referred many customers here and am also an occasional customer) because it is such a great place. I suppose I was just objecting to that "expand the customer base" suggestion as a response to a legitimate concern about review times and content theft.

[jellygator]

Thanks Constant for reassuring ThatWordChick and everyone else about the behind the scenes efforts to keep CC secure and profitable.

Jelly, I totally don't mind promoting CC (and I do! I've referred many customers here and am also an occasional customer) because it is such a great place. I suppose I was just objecting to that "expand the customer base" suggestion as a response to a legitimate concern about review times and content theft.

I know you do!

Sorry if my post came across as flippant. It wasn't meant to be.

[Celeste Stewart]

Jelly, you're always generous with your insights and willing to lend a helpful hand. Keep being you

[ThatWordChick]

Celeste & CC - thank you very much for your responses...it's encouraging to know that someone's listening!

While I'm glad that research and development is being applied to making CC a harder nut for scrapers to crack, can you tell me why you guys don't auto-run plagiarism checkers on current articles that have been submitted and accepted? My main point of contention here is that you seem to be willing to safeguard against buyers getting duplicated content, but don't apply the same effort to protect the work of writers trying to sell. Is it cost-prohibitive to do check in both scenarios?

In addition, while I respect that theft may be rare on the whole, I've had less than ten articles here on the site and I've been scraped three times. You have to understand that, at least from my perspective, it doesn't really look like theft is all that rare. I suspect some of it has to do with the fact that I consciously write about hot topics (i.e. gold selling at the moment) and advertise the holy heck out of them on twitter, but it sucks that my enthusiastic marketing is directing clients - good and bad - to a piece that I had scraped mere days after submitting it.

[Tianna]

Personally, I'd like to see minor mistakes like a missing, or misplaced comma be fixed rather than having it sent back to me. I've four articles that were returned to me sitting in my files right now because of comma's. I understand they don't want to fix big mistakes, ones that could affect the wording of an article, or even fix articles that have dozens of errors, but a comma or typo can be fixed easily. It would also get the articles on the site quicker and mean less work for the editors since they won't have to keep rereading the same articles over and over again. I understand that CC needs to make money and appreciate all of their hard work. This just seems silly to me.

[jellygator]

TWC, your post made me wonder about something.

You said you've had less than 10 articles, and three were found online.

I've randomly checked mine around once a month through copysentry.com , and have never found one online.

I wonder if it could have something to do with any of these things: 1) the type of file we submit 2) the types of articles - especially if they're topics that are often used as a basis to scam or spam people or 3) hacking or viruses. I don't know much about any of these, so I may sound like an idiot when I say this, but if anyone knows if these are or aren't risk factors, can you please clarify?

[SJHillman]

I'm still getting used to CC, but I'm in IT by trade so I may be able to help answer jelly's questions from a technical perspective.

Hackers and viruses are extremely unlikely unless you're known to be an exceptionally proficient writer who has been specifically targeted. Although CC does not appear to use SSL (What makes HTTPS secure), it's unlikely that a malicious type is intercepting the file. If they were, then we could expect to see a huge rise in pirated articles from here.

Based on my understanding of how CC works, there are two likely causes of unsold articles being pirated.
1) If you have a bit torrent or P2P software of any sort on your computer, your files are likely making their way throughout the Internet. Most users don't realize that P2P software tends to share ALL files on your computer by default for other people to copy at their leisure.
2) The most likely cause of pirated articles is people simply transcribing the images that CC uses to preview your article. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is an excellent example of where this would be a profitable activity. Odds are that MTurk has relatively few copyrighted works being processed but there are plenty of other more clandestine sites where third world workers will transcribe a 500 word article from an image to text for pennies.

My advice:
1) Make sure you don't have any P2P, bit torrent or pirated software on your computer. Pirating Photoshop or games is a great way to open up your files to the Internet even if you don't have the P2P software on your computer.
2) Avoid posting the entire article in the long summary if you're afraid of it being copied in its entirety. Leaving out the juiciest parts will make stealing it a less profitable activity.
3) Every industry has some form of theft; in retail, it's called shrinkage. The best you can do is accept that a certain level of it will occur no matter what you do. In all likelihood, the amount of articles being lifted will never amount to more than a couple percentage points for even a moderately proficient author.

[jellygator]

Thanks, SJH!

Great explanation that was easy to understand. If you're ever around Kansas City, I'll buy ya a beer.

[TommyC]

Just a point of contention on the P2P issue:

While it is true that P2P programs openly share the files kept within a certain folder--a folder set by you when you install them--they do not normally share files from any other location.

Any program that does so is malware, plain and simple. Not all P2P programs are malware.

That said, you should always do research on any software that you intend to download from the Internet. Just Google its name followed by "scam," "malware" or "virus" and read the results.

Additionally, as a general rule, you should install a program like MalwareBytes or similar, and use it in conjunction with a full-featured antivirus program at all times. The combination of the two should prevent the activity that the poster before me is alluding to.

A torrent client is a very different animal from a normal P2P program, and is generally much safer to use*. Stick with the larger names, ie, UTorrent, BitTorrent, etc.

Torrent clients do not dig into your hard drive and upload your files for the world to see. This is a myth propagated by bought-and-paid for antivirus companies and the music/entertainment industry/software industries**. Torrent clients can only upload files that you have downloaded with them--and only if you choose to allow the file to continue to seed-- or that you have prepared for upload with a torrent tracker. It simply can't happen by accident unless you are using or are infected by malware.

*I mean in the sense of computer safety, not in any legal sense.
**Because piracy cuts into profits.



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On the matter of how many articles CC sells a day, I would venture a guess that they sell much more than the 20 or so articles shown in "Recently Sold." Otherwise, this wouldn't be a very profitable endeavor at all.