Is the content business in trouble?

[Srinivasayyar]

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.

[SJHillman]

Article sales tend to be cyclic, so only looking over the last two or three months isn't enough to establish a permanent trend. From what I recall last year, March through May sold much better than June through August, then things ramped up again as we got closer to Thanksgiving and Christmas. It dropped off again shortly before Christmas until around Valentine's Day. Of course, this is just for me and other authors likely saw different trends based on what topics they covered, their writing style and sheer random chance.

[Isabelnewth]

It would be useful to know what the overall trends are though.. Just numbers of articles sold, average length of article sold, average price of sold articles every month or two would be nice to know...or is it on the site somewhere, or deducible somehow?

[evaku]

It happens... in February I got excited because I sold more than I ever had before. March and April were SUPER slow for me, May a little better, and now even moreso. I don't think you can say that the content business is in trouble (or ending!!) over a slow start one month based on stats from two months previous 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.

Don't worry I don't think we are in any sort of trouble, and nothing quite so immanent and abrupt!

[skylang]

It would be useful to know what the overall trends are though.. Just numbers of articles sold, average length of article sold, average price of sold articles every month or two would be nice to know...or is it on the site somewhere, or deducible somehow?

Yes, these would be useful statistics, as well as average days to sell.