Clients often come to me when they’ve tried another approach to content that hasn’t worked. Some have tried writing their content themselves, but found that they don’t have the expertise (or the time) to do it well. Others might have tried ChatGPT or other generative AI platforms but found the results more than a little, well, robotic. Another trap many business owners fall into is turning to content mills to get their website copy written or populate their blog with posts.
Since I’m all about firmly planting my flag in strong positions on divisive industry issues, here’s another one for you: content mills are the devil and you should never, ever, ever work with one.
What is a Content Mill, Anyway?
A content mill, also known as a content farm, is a company or platform dedicated to rapidly churning out a huge volume of low-cost content. These organisations often operate as middlemen or brokers, connecting clients to writers and pocketing a portion of the client fee for doing so.
The goals of a content mill are simple: do it fast, do it cheap, and do a lot of it.
What’s the Problem with Content Mills?
Let’s start with the obvious: content mills exploit writers.
Content mills pay extremely low rates to their writers, meaning that writers must create a massive volume of work to earn anything close to a living wage (and even then, many don’t.) These companies frequently target newer writers and those in lower cost-of-living countries, but it’s not okay to take advantage of someone just because they lack experience or because of where they happen to live. This practice not only harms the writers the content mills hire, but also harms all of us by driving industry rates down and creating the kind of “race to the bottom” pricing that’s common on freelance platforms such as Fiverr.
Paying £10 for an 800 word article is not normal. Paying £0.02 per word is not normal. It is pure exploitation.
The other huge problem is that content mill output is inevitably anywhere from “meh” to truly terrible. I’ve edited and rewritten content mill material in the past and it is often littered with spelling and grammatical errors, clunky syntax, clichés, and information that is simply wrong. It tends to be shallow, poorly researched, and generic, rarely providing any real value to the reader. And, though many content mills claim to be all about SEO, few go further than heavy-handed keyword stuffing.
This type of content doesn’t rank well in search results, and certainly doesn’t perform long term. It doesn’t build trust with your audience, position you as an authoritative voice, or convert readers into customers. In short, it doesn’t work. If anything, it does the oppositve. Content mills might be cheap, but they’ll cost you more—in poor search rankings, reduced customer trust, and damage to your business’s image—in the long run.
Content mills, like generative AI, are the Shein or Temu of the writing world. Can you, at least on the face of it, get a lot for your money? Yes. Will what you get be absolute crap that’s probably doing a lot of harm behind the scenes? Also yes.
Remember the “Fast, Cheap, Good” Rule
This simple concept, sometimes called the Triple Constraint, says that any product or service can be two of the three—fast, cheap, good—but it can never be all three.
- If you want good content done fast, you can expect to pay a premium.
- If you want good content done cheap, it will take forever.
- And if you want your content to be both fast and cheap, it will suck.
This third option is the model content mills operate on. They’re taking advantage of clients who are just starting out and don’t know any better, people who believe shoddy content is better than no content, and people who think volume is king. By the time you realise your content sucks and isn’t generating any return, they’ve got your money and moved on to the next target.
I think your business needs and deserves amazing content, even if it takes a little longer and costs a little more. Don’t you?
Are Content Mills Better Than AI?
At best? Barely.
In terms of performance alone, content mill copy is likely to fare slightly better than AI-generated material unless it’s truly atrocious, if only because it’s probably seen at least some human input beyond just writing a prompt. But even this isn’t a given. Search rankings, customer trust, and conversion rates are all built, in large part, on the quality of your content. If it’s bad, it won’t perform.
Ethically, they’re both terrible. Gen-AI operates on theft and consumes enormous amounts of precious resources including water and rare earth minerals, while content mills rely on exploiting writers and misleading clients.
There’s also another angle to this: the question of whether content mills are better or worse than gen-AI is a false dichotomy because most content mills and content mill writers are using AI. Low pay, high volumes of work expected, and easy access to free gen-AI platforms makes this almost inevitable. So if you use a content mill, you’re likely contributing to all the harms caused by gen-AI and exploiting human writers in the process.
What’s the Alternative? Grow Your Content ROI with a Writer Who Really Gets It
To get good content ethically, you have two main options: learn the skills and do it yourself, or hire a professional who knows what they’re doing.
A skilled content writer goes far beyond forced keyword-stuffing, shallow fluff, or just-on-the-right-side-of-plagiarism regurgitations what’s already out there. The right writer will take the time to understand your voice and your vision, getting to the heart of what you want to say. They understand how to connect with audiences, how to research and fact-check a topic thoroughly, and how to make any subject matter sparkle.
I’d love to be that writer for you. I specialise in supporting ethical businesses, SMEs, and solopreneurs who want to do things the right way. Save yourself the wasted time, wasted money, and inevitable disappointment of content mills and AI, and get it right the first time without compromising your values.
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