How Filipino Content Writers Contribute Negatively To The Online World
Being a Filipino, I know that I don’t need to look far from home to find skilled people. I have interviewed close to fifty Filipino content writers by now, but only two left a harrowing impression.
I was amazed and at the same time saddened by what I have learned, what mentality most Filipino content writers have. I am lucky, I skipped that dark and scary street of the online world.
What’s the deal with Filipino content writers, how do they contribute negatively to the online world?
There’s only one way to find out!
Milking Filipino Writers
You see, it’s not just Filipino writers who are doing it wrong. Every beginner fall in this trap set by greedy employers: cheap labor. And when the person you are interviewing would settle for $1 for every 300 words written, you will know that King Content is dead.
I asked him, “how much would you ask for this job?”
“$1 for 300 words for the first few months, then an increase would be nice,” was his answer.
What? In the Philippines, $300 monthly salary is already slightly above the average. For people who have just begun writing online, and if by ill luck they land on these $1 traps, they will need to write 4,500 words a day or 90,000 words in a month (for a five-day work week) just to earn $300. In case you’re not aware, a standard novel is composed of around 80,000 words. This is the worst of the worst. If you will labor 8 hours a day fleshing out 4,500 words on a single niche, or multiple topics, then you’re doing it wrong. You’ll be contributing negatively to the current state of our trade.
Relevant Video: Harlan Ellison’s Rant – Pay the Writer
You can disagree with me, by all means, but at least keep it to yourself until you finish reading this post. If you’re one of those employers, you can bend over and sodomize yourself.
To compare, native English speakers charge around 6 cents per words. That’s $5,400 monthly for 90,000 words. And you won’t even notice the difference, whether it’s a native who wrote the post or not. And Filipinos are only given $0.00333 per word.
Exhibit #1 – Milking Filipino Writers
The following images were taken from an online job listing. This is exactly what I was talking about.
Exhibit #2 – Milking Filipino Writers
What a gem, I found something even worse (actually the worst posting I’ve seen). And you’ll probably not inclined to believe that there will be people to apply for this job…that’s where you’re wrong. I’m not saying that it’s the job hunter’s fault for this kind of treatment, but when everyone decides to pay low wages…what choice is left for us?
Problem With Filipino Content Writers
- $200-$300 looks like a huge amount already, which is NOT. Researching and thinking and writing for someone else deserves more than $300!
- Working eight hours a day is normal…actually, scratch that. It’s 9 hours a day, with one hour break.
- Generally, Filipinos have good English skills, but they’re not utilizing it well.
With these three points, quite a lot of employers have seen another resource to exploit. Cheap labor, sacrificing employee, and perfect skills.
But the real problem is not with the employers, it’s with the writers.
Story Time
Once upon a time, a lonely 20-year-old decided to change his life, as long as he can do it inside his room. He browsed far and wide and found a job posting, “Looking for Blog Writers!” It was 1998, and the popularity of blogs was skyrocketing. It was time to cash on this new craze, of course.
Our hero AIM’d the job poster and soon the two began to talk. During that time, 1 USD was around 55 Philippine Peso, and being too trustful, meek, and inexperienced, our hero decided that $250 was a good starting point.
A month later his blog was booming. “Oh, wow!” the westerner exclaimed, “for only $250 I get this great writer to write for me? I need to tell my friends!”
And so it began, the endless loop of cheap labor. Those who dare break the tradition were not considered, and those who were willing to take $250 were the only ones hired.
Over a decade later it still happens.
The Problem With This
Listen up, you are literally renting your brains to these people. Is your brain only worth $250 monthly? Or $1 per 300 words?
Writing is hard, especially for non-fiction since you’ll need to have a prior knowledge of the subject or research it. Your research, your words. You’re putting words in the correct order for other people. They are renting your brain.
First mistake of our hero was he was too down-to-earth. This is closer to the truth than you’d imagine. We might now know who set this trend of cheap labor in the Philippines, but I can assure you that this is most likely what happened.
Quality Is Dead
At 1stwebdesigner, we’ve decided that in order to get quality content we need to pay people better. Our current rate is $150 for a high-quality article/tutorial. We don’t care about word count. If it’s a great article, you get $150. We don’t believe in paying cheap.
Ask yourself, will you trust a website that got its content from $300 per month writers? Writing is an art! Do you think they will spend all of their energies perfecting their writing? Some would even drop to the level of spinning articles, changing wordings and sentence structure, just to get by. Do you like that?
Unfortunately, the web is full of these blogs whose purpose is not to educate, but to earn money. And they will stop at nothing just to get a regular flow of published material. It doesn’t matter if they’re great, good enough is the new perfect.
It irks me. Filipinos deserve better. A lot of foreign nationals study English in the Philippines. They send their children here to learn how to speak and write in English.
$300, seriously?
I will not rent my brain for $300.
Will you?
I guess the whole point of this post is to tell you to…
ASK FOR MORE!
Because if you don’t, you’re contributing negatively to this industry by propagating low-quality articles while telling the whole world that it’s okay to be underpaid!
NO! I will not rent my brain for $300.
No one should. It doesn’t matter where you live or what degree you have. If you’re work is top-notch, then demand for more!
Interesting article, Rean. And I agree with you that everyone (not just writers) should be compensated fairly. I do, however, have one small suggestion. If you’re writing an article trying to convince others that your writing is “top-notch,” you may want to demonstrate that you know the difference between “you’re” and “your” (as in “your work is top-notch”) and that the verb “demand” doesn’t have the same usage as “ask” (you would “ask for more” or you would “demand more”).
Hi Steve,
Whoops, that’s a shame! haha, thanks for pointing them out. I should really be careful with everything.
Hi Rean,
Having worked at the position where you work now, I have dealt with a lot of filipino writers. You were among the three writers who actually deserved a writer’s job. And the remaining writers were seriously full of crap. Their english was terrible and they didn’t know “how to write an article” and were applying for a writer’s job. On top of that they were not professional at all and none of them met any deadlines.
If you and Michael had a good quality of work, you got a better job. Its as simple as that. But you are only 1% of those people who apply for these jobs.
While you are comparing salaries of a US national with a 3rd world country national, you should know that if they had to hire a dude on american salary, they would hire them from US rather than coming to Philippines writers.
The article does point out some legit facts but keep in mind making money online is not that easy as you wrote in article. If it could be the content only, no one would have worked for any one and every one had their own blog.
Another factor would be general salaries in your country. 300$ is probably more than what you would get while working in a normal position. That is why a lot of people apply for these online jobs.
Its simple rule of Demand and supply which applies here. There are a lot of countries except Philippines which are even cheaper. One example would be India.
I’m sure you know how good are filipino writers better than me and trust me most of them don’t deserve a writer’s job or even 300$. In the initial hiring process at 1wd, It was a waste of time and we had a hard time even getting 4-5 writers from the pool of 30 writers.
So its not 2+2=4. There are a lot of factors deciding the market price.
Best of luck for this new venture.
Hi Saad!
It’s been a while! Thanks for that great comment.
You are right, it’s not fair to compare salaries from 3rd world countries to the western world. But the thing is, 4,500 words a day for 20 days in a month is torture. You and I can do it, but we won’t definitely settle for $0.00333 per word, right? Yes, Philippines, India, Pakistan, and a lot more are ranked closely in terms of base pay. But the point isn’t really How Much money is involved, but How Much work. $300 is a good number, but is 4,500 words daily fair? They’re just milking writers dry. Exploiting it, because they know that people will fight for $300.
True, we’ve weeded through lots of applicants together and that wasn’t a nice experience! And I doubt they have landed anything at all. There are decent writers out there, even those without experience, and they’re falling on these traps.
In the end, it’s the writers’ choice, and that’s where I derived the title from. It’s a bad tradition that needs to be broken.
Rean, I need to agree with Saad. Obviously I was looking at start to Philippines as getting low cost full time person to do good work. Problem is that from around 100-200 people I hired and laid off, left just you and Michael. What’s the ratio??
It doesn’t matter where you live in, if you are smart, keep improving and actually deliver client great work, you will get paid handsomely!! And smart guys are reading your blog already, so get your message heard where it counts! Where people want to improve – like you! You earned everything on 1wd yourself, with your passion, hard work!
Now actually I am very hesitant looking at Philippines, because there is so much time involved and money spent to filter out good guys. I really would much better hire full time smart, experience American rather then messing around trying to teach new person, and I believe Return in investment is around the same. It’s just illusion you will get good work done..there are exceptions but yeah.
Ok, there is flip side I really like Philippines culture, you are such friendly guys, with no exceptions! Unless you don’t have earthquake or problems in family, everything is great.
The whole point is the amount of work needed to get the base salary of $300, or even $250. There are those who work like slaves, working more than 40 hours a day, or writing 5,000 words a day just to get $300 at the end of the month. That’s not fair, because if you weigh the amount of work, compensation shouldn’t be that meagre.
I’m not saying that $300 is a joke, it’s great money already. What I’m against is slave-like labor just to take home $300.
Let’s take this as an example: 4,500 words a day, 20 days, 1 month, for $300. In 1WD standards, that’s already 4 articles in a day. Research and writing. Imagine writing 4 full articles a day for a whole month and only receive $300. Is it fair? I don’t think so, but there are those who fall for these traps. This is the whole point of this article, it’s all about the AMOUNT of work needed to get that $300 salary. Not saying that $300 is a shitty salary, it is great already, just saying that 4,500 words a day for $300 is terrible.
Regarding hiring, I know what you mean. We’ve been doing it since 2010 and not only Filipinos (my dear brothers and sisters) failed us, but also just about anyone around the globe. The thing is, we can’t really get the best people just by doing everything online, especially because of the mentality that “online work is easy money”. But there are great talents here *ehem* and we only need to weed through them better, change our interview methods, our hiring copy, and, well, more time (which we have very little).
Anyway, please invest ALL of your money in the Philippines. :p
Well,
I have to agree that 0.003333 cents or whatever/per word is very cheap and mustn’t be considered by anybody, yet…
I’ll be honest and say that a year or so ago i actually hired people to write content for me. For $1.5/article. In the end, those articles were some blatant rewrites of other articles i eventually found online, so when you pay cheap you never have the guarantee that you’ll get quality, however, that’s not always the case, i found a guy who wrote articles for me at the same rate, yet i couldn’t be more happy with him. He probably agreed to write for me for such a low rate only because i needed 50 or 60 articles *bulk*.
And second, if people are happy with those rates, what can you do? I recalled a House M.D. episode (last season) where House’s team members criticized factories in Philippines, Thailand etc which relied on work done by minors, where Dr. Cheng (i believe that was her name) told that often children who work at those factories support their entire families, so.. we can’t really blame people for their wish to work. Of course many would be very happy to get a higher pay, but they can’t cause “the standards” are low but yeah, that’s another story
I’d reply to your comment, but I saw your email address so I’ll just torture you on Skype. haha
Hi Rean
Great article explaining the worst scenarios in content writing. These types of articles are the reason why lot of people being not interested in reading. I would never write for such low amounts. Luckily I am writing for 1stWebdesigner
Hi Rakhitha, nice seeing you here!
The money is already good, but the amount of work involved is what gives it a negative feel, right?
We’re actually pampered at 1stwebdesigner, the best!
Your analysis is flawed, because you didn’t factor in cost of living and actual living standards. For example:
• An entry-level, university-educated writer living in California could willingly work with a daily quota of 4500++ words, 20 days/month, for $5400, including benefits, insurance, significant job security and so on. However:
• $5400 in California will buy in California the same things that can be bought in Manila for Php22000 ($450). And:
• A seasoned California-based, university-educated writer with specialized knowledge and expertise in industries where only a few people have significant expertise in would most likely be interested in working with a daily quota of 4500++ words, 20 days/month, for $8000, including benefits, insurance, job security and so on. $8000 in California will buy in California the same things that can be bought in Manila for Php40000 ($1000). What does this mean?
=>> For Filipino writers to become more globally competitive: They should ask for around $600/month as entry level writer wages (daily quota around 4500++ words or so, 20 days per month), factoring in the absence of benefits, insurance and job security in an offshore subcontractual arrangement, while seasoned writers should ask for around $1400/month or so (with a similar daily quota, 20 days/month). This way, they can improve their chances of being hired by North American and EU-based corporations, companies, businesses and even individual affiliate marketers. My point is to look at this both ways — In the eyes of the employer and in the eyes of the subcontractor, in order to strike a balance and arrive at a mutually beneficial arrangement for the employer and the subcontractor.
Wow. A fellow writer fighting for fair pay. It feels good to actually have Filipino writers who believe we deserve higher pay. Though, I had realized things after reading the comments.
1. Quality of content is essential. Great quality=higher price, which must always be the case.
2. Things must be looked at from both views, client and article, which brings us to:
3. The cost-benefit analysis. Here’s a sad (but understandable) situation: I’m working for a client right now who pays me $0.80/100-word article. If we base this pay merely on the presumption that it’s a “cheap labor”, then we can conclude I’m being treated a slave. It’s an unfair compensation. But if we take into consideration that this client isn’t getting much revenues from his site ($0 revenue even!), we can’t expect him to pay me $10/100-word article, right?
That’s just a piece from me.:)
You’re an excellent writer, by the way. Hopefully I’ll become one, too, someday.
Continue the excellent work.
Hi Diana,
Mabuhay!
We’re all set in different situations, some better than the others, but the most important thing to do is to never stop looking for better “deals”. Right? I’m pretty sure that most underpaid writers right now are just biding their time, gathering experience and enough clients, so that someday they’ll have a robust resume/portfolio to be proud of. That’s what I’m currently doing, and I’m pretty sure you’re the same as me.:)
Thanks for dropping by!