Freelance Writing Assignments Available (Pt. 2 – Demand Studios / Demand Media)
This is the second in a series of articles that I will be doing on freelance writing opportunities available. The first one, located here, was on Fortitude. As the title indicates, this one will be on Demand Studios aka Demand Media.
I'm going to start this with a disclaimer, I no longer write for Demand Studios for reasons I'll discuss later. I'm a little bitter toward them, so I wanted to give you a heads up as far as this blog entry is concerned.
I began writing for Demand after reading a couple of articles on them, one of which was in Wired, a magazine I love. I was approved pretty quickly, and began writing within a day of being approved.
THE GOOD – Demand pays all right for their articles. It is pretty easy to make $15 an article for 400 words or so, although they have different "styles" of articles which may pay as little as $3 (or a revenue share) and the website shows that some articles pay as much as $25, although I never saw any of those and suspect they are either non-existent or something for the future. Still, $15 is okay. Demand Studios pays through PayPal and payment is sent twice a week (every Tuesday and Friday?) and there is rarely a problem with them paying. It is nice to know that if you have a certain goal then it takes X number of articles to reach that goal so it gives you some flexibility in your earning potential.
THE BAD – When I first signed up for them I looked at their Facebook page and saw a tearful goodbye from a writer who was suddenly "fired" by DS which raised a red flag not to rely on them too much for a steady income.
I write a lot of legal articles and the second or third one I wrote was flagged for plagiarism. I don't plagiarize without noting it in the writing (citing). It took me a while to figure out what was happening and after an email back and forth with the editor on that piece (and she was very curt) she pointed out the section that was plagiarized. It was statutory language. When I pointed out that it was cited and directly from the statute, as well as necessary to the article, she referred me to an attorney's website that had the same language but not a cite to the statute. Despite several emails and appeals Demand refused to lift this as plagiarism when it clearly was not.
Most of the editors at Demand are great. Good editing, good suggestions, and not a lot of bother. However, some of them are ABSOLUTELY AWFUL. There was one editor in particular that would nitpick an article and try to change your style to hers. Any article I submitted that drew her as an editor was awful and I chose to abandon several rather than go through the rewrites she suggested because they were 1) unnecessary 2) wrong and 3) made the article a money loser. Unfortunately, I wrote a travel article that was accused of plagiarism and was banned from Demand. I know I didn't plagiarize anything in the article and they would never tell me what part I was supposed to have stolen. I sent several appeals but never received any response so the whole thing left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
The critical problem with Demand seems to be the volume that they have to turn out makes them unable/unwilling to look for quality and to take time to retain or work with their writers.
That said, I think they are okay to write for just don't rely on them.
great post, thanks for sharing