Diary of a Mad Editor

The other day, I was reading an article on some tech news website in which the author was lamenting the "inevitable" death of print magazines and the lack of quality control online (terribly ironic when one considers that he had written this article for an online publication). I am always suspect of an advocate of print publishing who makes a blanket statement about the poor editorial standards of online publishers. Not that there aren’t plenty of instances of lackadaisical editorial standards online (which we’ll get to shortly), but given that there are plenty of instances of lapses in both editing and fact-checking in offline publishing, it’s not at all fair to say that offline automatically equals quality and online automatically equals low quality. To prove his point, though, the author pointed to a well-known article farm. The term "article farm" is obviously a derogatory term. Simply put it’s a site that offers both free and custom-written articles about a variety of topics based on certain keywords. Like me, if you’ve been involved in online writing and publishing, you’ve probably written for these sites at some point and used some of these articles for your newsletters and websites.

Which brings me to a site called articlealley.com. Just this morning I was asked to review this site. It is, by definition, an article farm that employs many, many writers to produce both free and custom articles. There are a number of custom-writing packages offered ranging from $40 for a single article to $23 per article for bulk purchases. I couldn’t help think about the previously mentioned article while I browsed this site. Although this company promises high standards of quality control for it’s custom articles, I am assuming that the same writers creating this content are the same guys and gals writing the free articles available on the site. If so, let the buyer beware. Having read a number of the free articles on the site, I have to tell you that the quality control is non-existent. The information contained in the article is generic and unoriginal. Copyediting and proofreading are likewise non-existent. Many of the articles don’t even seem to be written by writers who speak and write English as a primary language. One such article, “Kanye West Lady Gaga A True Rock Performer” is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. That gives me pause.  Read that article and tell me honestly you’d pay Azeem to write for your website. Because if you are paying $40 for an article that you have to edit and rewrite yourself, you’d be better off  writing it yourself to begin with and saving your money.

I know of several of these so-called article farms that actually do demand a certain standard from their writers and do take some time with an article and demand rewrites prior to approving an article. Unfortunately, many don’t and that makes everyone who publishes online look bad. My hope is that articlealley.com has higher standards for its custom articles and will be more discerning in the future when it comes to their free articles. Because when it comes to generating traffic and ad revenues, quality is much more important to the equation than keyword density.