chuck_taylor

I've worked in the news business for 30 years and I've never even heard of OpenPR, for what that's worth.

They're not getting paid per call. It's just for metric purposes.

I think you mean AdSense. AdWords are a way for content creators to <i>spend</i> money, not make it.

In any event, AdSense revenue is trivial compared to the cost of creating content that has any widespread impact.

Well, OK, but that's an awfully narrow example. What happens when you are asked, or want, to write of something about which you know only a little? Or something you sort of know well but which requires a modest degree of fact-checking and verification?

Put another way, how much do you expect to earn per hour for this sort of work? How long does it take you to write an informative 300 words?

Word count is not an indication of the effort involved. Itg's not merely a matter of typing in words like a monkey. You have to know about which you write. The more you know, likely the more time it took you to learn it. Time is money, words are just words.

Most likely Wired didn't do anything based on a press release. The P.R. industry would like you to believe they are able to drive the news agenda, but when it comes to the Wireds and The New York Timeses of the world, it's rare for a press release to lead to a story of this magnitude.

Most likely, Demand Studios' P.R. people freaked out when Wired inquired.

This story likely took weeks to report and write. A graphic artist probably spent at least a week preparing the chart. Good journalism takes a lot of effort, and so few people realize that.

As someone who has been paid to write and edit news for 30 years, this article was pretty depressing, but I already knew about Demand Studios. And you know what? It looks like they take good care of their writers, at least in the karma department. These seem to be folks who have always wanted to be paid to write but never had the opportunity to get paid for it, enjoy surfing the Web, and can bang out three or four of these articles in a day and have some good walking-around-money.

They seem to be mostly American, but at some point I'm sure the Third World will be recruited to drive the price down even further. Seen what they are paying on Mechanical Turk?