A Rookie’s Mistake: My Time At A Content Farm

“We all make mistakes in the heat of passion, Jimbo.”

What an unassuming meme quote from a long-gone Nickelodeon cartoon that has become the tagline behind a disastrous writing month. Last fall and winter, I was still kicking cans after The Great Purge of Recurrent Ventures binned dozens of staffers and hundreds of contributors across several publications with hardly a moment’s notice. One writer was even cut mid-press trip, which caused much backlash against our now-former corporate overlords.

In short, hordes of us got shitcanned, and I had to act cleverly to stay afloat.

I, in fact, did not.

Not to downplay myself, but I honestly felt I didn’t have the luck, connections, or experience of my higher-profile colleagues, so recovering from this setback was undoubtedly an uphill battle. I was patiently hoping that I could land another long-term gig, foolishly passing on offers to return to a regular nine-to-five. Finally, after many applications and inquiries falling on deaf ears, I stumbled across a seemingly legit site on LinkedIn, believing to have found my savior.

Can anyone see where this is going?

So began the story of my shamefully colossal fuck up, an invaluable life lesson born from a rookie’s mistake. About a month ago, yours truly had signed up to slave away for the bane of journalism, a good old-fashioned content farm.

Calm Before The Storm

For those unfamiliar with the concept of content farms, you’re about to hear me ramble quite a bit about it. Essentially, content farms are half-hearted attempts at digital media formulated for grabbing views and, therefore, ad revenue. They can be blogs or video channels, where short stories containing vague information, subpar quality, and poor editing define their character.

Beneath the surface, things don’t look much prettier. Former writers have repeatedly stepped forward and exposed the hands that fed them for lazy journalism, accusations of plagiarism, content theft, and astronomical workloads paid in measly scraps.

I knew none of this because I read Car And Driver and Road & Track like a good boy. But I was about to get a hard, month-long lesson in the multimillion-dollar clickbait biz.

Aside from the sudden layoffs, my previous stint at Recurrent Ventures spoiled me. For my first full-time gig at a big publication, they paid an unreal amount (to a 24-year-old punk kid) to write thoroughly-researched buyers guides on a litany of obscure and interesting products with near-total autonomy. Life was good. I knew it, my colleagues knew it, and our editors knew it. We all loved it. And most of all, as simple as buyers guides were, I was happy to write what I was writing, satisfied knowing that I taught an audience something while learning a thing or two myself.

By contrast, the vibes at this new site were quite a ways off. I’m the farthest thing from a people whisperer, but anyone can read these horror-story reviews on Glassdoor or Indeed and know they’re about to be in some shit. Yet, stupid me refused to turn back, eager to get back to work after way too long of a hiatus.

The site in question claimed to be in a period of expansion and laid out quite an alluring job proposition. It was the title of staff writer, complete with salaried pay, enticing bait for someone longing for stability. The job interview raised questions regarding pay structure and workload, but I accepted nonetheless and eagerly chased that first paycheck on the road to financial recovery.

My Life On The Farm

To my shock, bits of conversation after the interview revealed I wasn’t what some would traditionally consider a true staff writer. Instead, I was a salaried freelancer, meaning zero benefits. There was no W-2 status, no healthcare, and no retirement. To call that another red flag would be an understatement. Despite this, they still demanded 40 hours per week with no paid time off, so I guess I’d go fuck myself if I ever got sick, suffered a household accident, or if my Nissan Be-1 ever decided to implode with me in it.

If I wasn’t fully familiar with what a content farm was then, I sure as hell was by the second week once the training wheels came off and I was set loose to dish out stories, if you can call them that.

Their claims of quality and being the go-to site for industry news are outright lies, I tell you. This website masquerades as some A-List contender to big-name car magazines, but it only prides itself on its engagement numbers. Moreover, the bulk of its writing is the typical and infamous churn-and-burn stories, which occupied most of my time.

For an entire month, I was the shit stain on the underwear of journalism, writing half-hearted rehashes of press launch material or brochures from manufacturer websites. I tried my hardest to like it, thinking there was some method to the madness or perhaps some hidden genius somewhere, but there wasn’t. Instead, there were only “Why This Car Is Insane” or “Why This Is The Car To Buy In 2023” pieces.

These not-so-featureful feature stories often recycled already-known information via hasty research. As such, the points for reinforcing one’s thesis are often the most obvious facts anyone and their grandmother can dig up from a single dealership pamphlet. Of course, we writers can spin these same topics into something whimsical and highly informative with unique angles, but no one ever had time for such thought. 800-word features had to be submitted within hours, with one editor touting that a veteran writer could knock out a feature story in roughly 45 minutes. The news was roughly 400 words and two hours, which this same editor claimed experts could crank out within 20 to 30 minutes. These time frames also include sourcing, proofreading, linking, and adding photos all by yourself, mind you.

What isn’t regurgitated Google search results are simple-minded listicles or mere ads for various YouTube videos by all sorts of automotive personalities. I’m all game for supporting fellow content creators, but when half the damn home page is miscellaneous car reviews or builds we can otherwise find on YouTube itself rather than craft original stories, you get an idea of how uninspired the leadership is.

Contrary to their motto, there’s seldom any actual auto industry news, with editors claiming that the site focuses more on car culture, only covering industry happenings when they’re truly groundbreaking. However, in telling me that, they contradict themselves. They’ll clearly write about minor industry occurrences so long as a YouTuber discusses it, thus giving them a freebie video to embed. Clever, I suppose.

Demand for a “staff writer” under their umbrella was also ludicrously high. They gave me a quota of five daily stories and a hundred per month. Yes, you read that right. One, zero, zero. You can write more or fewer stories per day and decide which days to work or not, which they touted as a “flexible” work-life balance, as long as you matched their monthly quota.

I probably wrote less than 40 by the end of my only month, simply because there just weren’t that many worthwhile stories to cover in a single day. On top of hunting for anything and everything to potentially pitch, I was still contesting for already-pitched topics up for grabs with their legion of nearly 200 freelancers. As you can imagine, the overlap in pitches was unbelievable, and a quick browse will reveal that the site will shamelessly publish several near-identical stories on the same damn car, backed by the same facts and taken from strikingly-similar angles.

Their incessant nitpickiness with SEO tactics for harvesting views was the spoiled icing on top that drives me up the wall to this day. Keywords were sacred, which isn’t an alien thing among any publication. Having worked in commerce departments at Recurrent sites, you’d obviously want to make handy use of keywords and tidy formatting to have a clean, presentable guide for readers to digest. But it gets pretty old being told to cram keywords in every paragraph and subheading, resulting in stories that can’t help but exude a cheap, manufactured feel, especially with how short they are.

Why, yes, I know I’m reading about a 1967 Alpine A110! I clicked on the story, didn’t I? Bah!

“It’s all to please Mr. Google,” one editor told me when breaking down how they structure their articles. By then, it was clear. At sites like these, clickbait is king, and algorithms are God.

Life For The Farmers

What is especially insulting is how this website and others like it treat its contributors. If only I could name the sites here and now so you can look up their reviews on job sites.

As part of their early expansion effort, I was allegedly the first and only staff writer when this particular site hired me. That meant everyone else with an author’s page under this corporate umbrella was purely a freelancer. So they didn’t necessarily have the same quotas as me, but they worked under the same time constraints, having only a few hours per story whenever they did write.

According to various ex-contributors, their pay was abysmal. Many quoted anywhere between $5 to $20 per story, whereas a similar-length feature at any other site could fetch in the hundreds. They might as well kick them in the groin and run off with their pieces. Contributors seeking to make this a viable source of income often write an unholy number of stories each month.

One editor claimed that someone managed to sling 157 stories in one month. That was before they suddenly went silent.

Outside my usual wheelhouse, I implored my bosses to do buyers guides akin to what I wrote for Recurrent, which they said was a possibility but insisted I focus on staying in my lane for the time being. They quoted me $50 a piece if I were to write guides for them, a fraction of a fraction of what they’d be worth elsewhere.

Granted, DriveTribe did have a similar pay structure, except that place was actually fun.

To further salt the wound, I learned the site does have a team of genuine auto journalists that do more traditional, higher-authority content, including research-driven stories, interviews, and car reviews. However, their work was oddly scarce on the homepage. I later learned only four journalists comprise the team, all part-time. I was told they prefer to contribute to multiple places, and I don’t blame them.

Additionally, editors hardly edit depending on who your immediate editor is. Any discrepancies usually circle back to you to fix, most of which are formatting issues or requests for more keywords, links, or tags. Oftentimes, they never bothered to mention typos I found in my work when revisiting for a final polish. I suppose grammatical errors must take a back seat.

For instance, I recently visited the site to see how it’s been doing. The first headline to catch my eye was for a Shmee150 video, where the title referred to his Ferrari “WF90” rather than an SF90. Seriously? Can no one even look out for that? Not one editor? It’s in the damn title, yet it managed to fly and land on the homepage.

In fairness, many writers are actually based in foreign countries, which I found to be the one commendable thing about the parent company. Not bad to offer equal opportunity to a global workforce, right? But actual editing seems nonexistent. It’s a massive fail, especially when this worldwide team is prodded to focus on North American interests rather than share automotive experiences from their corners of the globe.

Numerous former writers from sites like these don’t even believe these places to be appropriate for honing writing skills, aside from learning how to write a lot and write fast. If anything, I’d argue that it fosters slothful research techniques and an overly-SEO-centric mindset that degrades quality. You get the bare-basic gist of how a newsroom works within the first week, and then you’re burned out by the next. And while editors offered me opportunities for press trips and the possibility of a higher salary and self-publishing abilities, it still wouldn’t be worth it knowing the unfulfilling junk articles I’d have to write on a daily.

Taking the massive pay cut with no benefits to pump out monotonous, unfulfilling work is one thing, but jeopardizing my integrity as a writer is something I refuse to do. Former colleagues I’ve spoken to about the site warned me that staying could prove detrimental to my career, especially with the site coming under heavy criticism from disgruntled readers and the parent company taking heavy legal fire for #justcontentfarmthings.

Near the end of my stint, I grew from anxious and eager to work to annoyed and downright furious that I had been reduced to baiting site visitors into reading my soulless garbage, no matter how hard I tried to polish it or infuse my own spirit. I didn’t want to stick around long enough to see if my old coworkers were right. I needed a way out, and I needed one fast.

“Nigerundayo, Smokey!”

After talking to friends and former work buddies, who unanimously shared animosity towards these kinds of websites, I hatched a plan. It was a brilliant plan to end all plans, the likes of which had likely never been seen, not even by the most genius military strategists in history.

I quit.

I submitted my one-week notice per my contract and dipped out. I closed out the final week doing small-time news, more of the same “Watch This YouTube Video” pieces, and issued my goodbyes to the editors.

My sudden departure took my mentor by surprise, which he expressed in a group chat with the parent company’s HR. Another editor asked for my honest take on what the site did wrong to spur my resignation, and I gave my long-winded critique, not unlike what I’m writing here. Neither had any response other than thanks for my feedback. They bid me farewell as I had done, wished me luck, and cut me loose.

Once the final texts were exchanged, it became official. The days of seeing Slack notifications from dawn to dusk were behind me.

Now, out of a full-time gig once again, I walk away with a newfound appreciation for having the liberty to write what I want and make sure it matters. It was a rough month, to say the least, but now I have some newfound wisdom to share with my fellow rookies.

Well, Well, Well, If It Isn’t The Consequences Of My Own Actions

Don’t ever sell yourself short, you hear me? You and your work are worth far more than a few bucks per piece or a measly salary. You just have to keep looking for a home that gives a damn about telling a proper story, a real story.

Yes, practice and experience are the best way to tune your skills, but there are better places to share your voice than clickbait factories where it will only be muddied. Just be patient if you want to jump into a legitimate writing career. Take your time, cast your net far and wide, and have patience. Please.

As a good friend of mine discussed, it’s better to have a smaller portfolio of eloquently-written tales than a bucket of mass-produced slop.

This story is by no means an attempt to say I’m better than anyone or assert myself as some elitist deserving of more, but rather a lesson in never selling yourself short. I already did my time writing short-form stories like that as a college side hustle on DriveTribe, and that was when we were all school kids writing for fun and didn’t even know what a content farm was. I have to keep moving forward, not back.

For the freshest of writers here, there’s no harm in starting slow. Take no shame in focusing on studies or working other jobs until you’re ready to pursue serious gigs in a less conventional field, such as journalism or content creation. But don’t settle for mediocrity to get your name off the ground, as you’ll soon find out you won’t fly very high.

On To The Next Chapter

As of publishing, I’m back to irregularly slinging more heartfelt stories on PRNDL Community and Winding Road Magazine. And in a bid to widen my own net, I’m also pursuing a change of environment within the automotive industry and chasing a sales and marketing position at a local speed shop.

It’s not quite the big leagues for me. Not yet. But at least I’m free.

Now, I can rest easy knowing I’ll eventually make a living going back to meaningful work, helping my fellow enthusiasts while expanding my automotive knowledge. And yes, that goes for both the speed shop and this humble blog I call home.

As a former Recurrent colleague told me in response to my employment shift, writing will always be here for me, as evident in this very story. And while I may have been a downtrodden and impulsive fool over a month ago, these new opportunities have me more excited for the future than I’ve ever been.

No, I can’t exactly say where I’ll be a year from now, but one thing is certain: I sure as hell won’t miss harvesting clicks on some damn farm.