Hey, the shameless plug is welcome here, Agent! That’s the frustration I felt too, and many have echoed on countless forums and LinkedIn groups. The “Freelance writing is dead” pronouncement is so easy to make when all you see is crap like the ad above.

Twenty bucks for a high-quality health article…right. That’s not happening! LOL

I noticed in your post you were happy with 60 pounds for 1,000-1,500 words. Starting out, that’s not terrible, but only just. I’m hoping you’re doing much better these days — I get $1/word for my stuff (and I suspect you could get 85p per word quite easily given your SEO background). Always aim higher, I say.

This. This idea is amazing. We could certainly do that, Paula!

I didn’t check it out beyond the initial listing.

Maybe a Writer’s Worth month idea could be contacting the sites that publish these listings and encourage them to screen out anything that pays that little.

As if trying to get work on Upwork and Freelancer.com wasn’t bad enough, I found a guy on ProBlogger who paid $70 to list the job for a new health website he was trying to get off of the ground.

He wanted really high quality, well research posts at least 2,000 words and he wanted it for… $20 per article. Anything else was unacceptable. Good luck with that, especially in the health niche where the accuracy of the content is really important!

Shameless plug; I wrote an article on how to get online article writings jobs for beginners . Maybe some users can find it useful.

It was pretty bad, wasn’t it?

They did name retailers — Best Buy and Bloomingdale’s. I would guess neither of those companies would want their name associated with this. And I would guess you’re right — IF they’re working for these companies, there’s no way that’s all they’re being paid.

Any major retailer would be paying a LOT more than even 10¢ per word, so these bozos are probably keeping 99% of their fees and dividing the remaining 1% among their pool of consistent team players.

Of course they’ll find writers willing to work for that, but only because they live in areas where cost-of-living rates are our sub-sub-sub-poverty rates.