A funny thing happened on the way to writing a story about Suite101.
A couple weeks ago, the content site’s PR firm contacted me. They’d seen my blog posts on whether or not freelancers should write for content sites, websites that use contributors with all manner of backgrounds to crank out hundreds, if not thousands of how-tos and evergreens a day all the better to attract eyeballs, and advertising. Would I be interested in talking to Peter Berger, Suite101’s CEO, on how the Vancouver, BC, company is a different type of content site?
Of course I said yes. With publications like Wired, Vanity Fair, Time and Folio waking up to this story, it’d be my chance for an update.
Then, a couple days before the interview, I got a Google Alert from a notice I’d set up to track mentions of my byline. The alert was letting me know someone had linked to a story on a tech-related topic I’d written back in March 2009. And the someone was a writer at – you guessed it – Suite101.
Hold that thought.
I recently talked to Berger, a German national and CEO of the 14-year-old site. That’s right, Suite101 dates back to 1996. But the company in its current form dates back to 2006, when the present owners took over and turned it into the business you see today. Those owners are Hubert Burda Media, the privately held German publisher of more than 250 magazines and other print and online properties, and German-born, Vancouver-based Internet investor Boris Wertz, who runs W Media Ventures and was previously COO at a German book dealer Amazon gobbled up in 2008.
Despite what Berger maintains, Suite101 shares many similarities to other content sites, including Demand Media, the 800-pound gorilla of the business. Those similarities: running how-to pieces, essays and evergreens writers can crank out in a couple hours or less; a revenue model based on traffic and impressions; and workforce that’s a mix of professional and amateur writers.
There are differences. Demand uses computer algorithms to figure out popular search terms and then makes articles based on those keywords available to the first writer in its pool of qualified contributors to grab it. Demand also pays by the piece. Suite101, on the other hand, doesn’t dictate what its writers cover. And it pays them based on an advertising revenue share rather than by the story. Like some other content sites, Suite101 puts writers through an application process, accepts approximately 20 to 30 percent of all writers who apply, and claims to hold those writers to fairly high editorial standards.
All well and good. Except that it’s now time to get back to the Suite101 writer who did the story mentioning the tech piece I got the Google Alert about.
It would be unfair to base an analysis of all Suite101 writers on one. It would also be unfair to critique the site based on one story out of the 500 that Berger says are posted every day. But if this piece is any indication, Suite101 and I have different definitions of quality. I’m doing a lot of editing work right now, and if this writer worked for me, that piece would have been kicked back for a rewrite faster than you can say AP Stylebook. As a matter of fact, Berger got back in touch a few days after our interview to let me know the piece was in fact going to be taken down and reworked – so props to them for wanting to make a such good impression on one lowly media industry blogger they’d go to that effort.
Even so, I remain unconvinced writing for any content site, including Suite101, is in a writer’s best interest, especially someone starting out in the profession and needing the kind of editorial guidance that’s required to turn them into a better writer.
But if you’re interested in learning more, here’s the Q&A, which covers how often Suite101 writers are required to post, how much top-earners make and more. I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity.
WordCount: How did Suite101 get started?
Berger: It was founded in 1996 but the recent history started in 2006 when the present owners bought out the original founders. We refocused the company around the idea that we want to publish quality. We moved to traditional editorial standards and an application process to make sure we were using people who could write quality nonfiction content. We publish everything nonfiction; our editorial could be advice or essays. We leave it up to the writers to decide, within our guidelines, what they want to publish. We put them with experienced editors to help them achieve their goals.
How are rights and compensation structured?
Writers retain the copyright to their work. We have exclusive rights to publish online for a year. We guarantee revenue share for as long as the content is on the site, unlike competitors that cap that at some point. We current average $3.90 per 1,000 impressions. Some make much more and some make much less. We also measure revenue directly, we don’t approximate it. We track for what your content generates and share the revenues directly. We partnered with Google to create a system that does that.
So what a contributor makes is based on traffic to their stories?
It’s a step further than that. In some areas it’s easy to generate impressions and others it’s not. So they’re successful if it’s easy to generate traffic and a subject people are interested in. A good example is our parenting or home and garden sections, those are typically areas where writers do quite well.
What could a writer make?
With a site that’s published 8,000 writers, it’s across the board. Our monthly record was $5,000 last summer. But our best writers are typically making $2,000 to $3,000 consistently month after month. A handful make $3,000 a month. That’s generated with a relatively small number of articles that are very successful. The writers who make the most money are not the highest volume contributors. We talk to those writers because they want to understand what they did well on those pieces. One writer decided to write an article every day for a given period to see if she could make it work. Another applied all the tips we gave her and materials on the site. Typically she’d invest one hour for research and one hour for writing and stayed within her area of expertise.
Of those 8,000 writers, how many contribute on a regular basis?
Currently we see active on the site roughly 4,000 who’ve published at least once in the past two months. But there are a number of people who are extremely active. We’re publishing 500 articles every day.
Isn’t there a requirement for writers to publish at least 10 articles over three months to continue working for the site?
Yes, 10 over three months. We’re investing in the writer with our editorial team, and what we expect back is that they take it seriously as well. At the start we spend time with them as they learn the ropes. We want them to have the energy to keep working with us.
Are Suite101 contributors professional writers or just people interested in a subject or looking to make money?
We never did a study so I can’t answer that definitively. But based on observation, I can say a third of our writers are professional in that they make a living from writing, a third are used to publishing but don’t depend on it as their sole source of income, and a third can write to meet our editorial standards. We would encourage people who are qualified in something and want to write about it to apply. Applying involves submitting two articles to our site (which editors review). Our current approval rating is 20 to 30 percent of people who apply.
What does your editorial team consist of?
The English-language staff editors are in Vancouver. We also have 50 editors who work across the world. They’re not in-house, we pay them based on their (edited) articles. Some of them are close to full-time working for us. They have a professional editorial background, very often they have a print background. We give them training and meet them at least once a year to update their skills. They’re really part of our team.
Demand Studio and Associated Content have deals to supply original articles to newspapers such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Is Suite101 pursuing similar deals?
It sounds like a great story but in terms of what we see in the marketplace it has very little value. What our site is really good at is publishing evergreen content. People don’t go to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for that kind of content. That’s what we are really good at.
Content sites are getting lots of press these days. Time magazine did piece recently where a Time writer tried his hand writing for Demand Media. Is all the attention good or bad for Suite101?
It’s a great opportunity to explain what we do, because people have an undertanding of what a large competitor is doing. We’re quite different, of course. We are interested in working with quality. We start with what is our writer good at. We see ourselves as a service to our writers more than someone who publishes content. The attention is good though, because there’s a new understanding of the opportunities, people have much more open minds and try to understand what we’re doing
Since you’ve brought up quality, I have to tell you about the Google News alert that brought to my attention a Suite101 article that mentioned something I’d written – and the piece wasn’t very good. How do you explain that?
If we find writers can’t meet our editorial standards we stop working with them and ask them to take down content that’s not good enough. I don’t want to hypothesize what happened. But we have pretty traditional editorial standards: stories have to be well-written, they have to have a lead, a message, an ending. They have to have attributions and links.
Some content sites require contributors to use a lot of SEO – do you?
We explain to writers how people search on the web and how their content will be found. The tips we have are very basic and it’s more to think how a reader would search for your story and title it more descriptively that you would in a traditional newspaper story when the headline doesn’t matter as much because they already have the paper in front of them. We also tell them what they may have heard about SEO, about stuffing keywords, is nonsense. What people want to find on the web is the highest quality piece, and from an expert. That’s what we encourage them to do. Write the article and understand it. If people are searching for an article use ‘rose garden’ instead of ‘rose gardening,’ use that word in the title. But we don’t encourage them to change the way they write.
What kind of traffic do you get?
We get about 27 million unique visitors a month, that’s based on Google Analytics. Quantcast says 25 million. That’s for all of our sites: we launched two years ago in Germany and last year in France and Spain.
How many of your contributors are outside North America?
North America is by far the largest. Of 8,000 contributors, 5,000 would be in the United States. We have a very large number in Canada and the UK as well. And a lot of people living in countries outside the US write for English language site.
Any parting thoughts?
The thing that sets Suite101 apart is the relationship between writers and the editorial team. Our commitment is to retain quality people on the site and work together in a professional relationship.
Well done, Michelle.
Esse quam videri, Peter. Learn it, live it.
Great piece, Michelle. What stands out is the reactive editorial response. I wonder how the site manages editorial oversight with so many pieces being posted daily?
The quality question will remain, I suspect. While there are some good beginning/intermediate writers, there are even more who still lack some fundamental skills. Those are the people I see flocking to these places.
It’s virtually impossible to (accurately) judge the standards of this site based on new articles. Articles go live on the site immediately; they are reviewed by editors while they’re live on the site.
This is great for writers, since we can have our work published without days of waiting. But unfortunately, you may have a new writer who’s not up to speed in terms of the site’s standards – their article will also go live. So it may take anywhere for a few hours to a few days to get that article revised in a way that reflects the site’s standards. The editor has to review the article, request revisions, and then the writer has to perform the revisions.
I’ve written for this site and their standards are higher than any other comparable site. And their editors true professionals – definitely not the half-wits working at Demand Studios! You’ll earn much more than $15 or $20 per article at Suite 101 and you don’t have to work with Demand Studios editors who request revisions that contradict what’s dictated in the stylebook. Suite 101 wins hands down in my opinion.
Sylvia:
Thanks for much for sharing your experiences with Suite101 – it always adds to the conversation to hear from people who’ve worked for a particular company. I find it curious, though, that Suite101 has writers post their unedited first drafts to the site immediately and have editors look at them afterward. As a writer, I wouldn’t mind waiting a couple extra days for an editor to review my work if it meant a more polished – and potentially lucrative – end product. Peter Berger didn’t mention anything about that practice in our interview or in his followup email to me about the particular story I mentioned in the post. Regardless, it’s nice to know you hold their edit staff in such high regard.
Michelle
Ugh, when I saw the headline, I was worried you might be saying something nice about them.
I was glad to discover that this was not the case.
I made the mistake of writing for Suite101 when I was fresh out of j-school and desperate for a job.
What a mistake. One I feel I’m still paying for since my work there, despite being serveral years old, still ranks higly when Googling my name even though I have since moved on much more respectable (and much better paying publications.)
So here’s my version. At the time I started, something that we now refer to as “social media” was beginning to get popular. We were encouraged to use it (read: spam). As a result, the domain was, at one point anyone, blocked from being submitted to pretty much any social media site that mattered. I’d have to check but I’m pretty sure the imfamous Wikipedia ban is still in place.
Now, to give Suite101 some credit, at the time, they were pretty stict on who was allowed to write for them. Pretty much everyone had some kind of professional writing background and you applied to write for a particular section as a subject matter expert.
Most of the writing at the time was at least “okay,” but was hosted on a site with a pretty awful design.
However, a while later they opened to floodgates and hired a few thousand new writers and let them run free all over the site.
So, while I did a reasonable job at writing researched articles (admittedly, I didn’t put as much effort into them as I would have for a publication paying a per-word rate,) suddenly my topic page was flooded with people knocking-off How-To content in 15 minutes, which was pushing my work down to the point where my articles were almost never visible on the topic page for more than an hour.
Not that it mattered from anything other than an ego perspective. The site was always more focused on traffic from Google or StumbleUpon than creating a site that would get readers to hang around a bit.
I’m not sure why I kept going, I guess I naively thought I might still be building up “clippings” that would land me a future job or maybe my traffic would pick up and I’d actually start making this “$300 a month average” they kept touting. However, I finally resigned when they switched to an “automated editing system.”
Essentially, they set up the CMS to reject any article more than 600 words and any “blog post” (in quotes because calling their “blogs” a blog was a joke) longer than 300 words.
The worst part of that was say you’d written a 700 word piece before this system came into effect and noticed a typo in it. You go back to fix it and now the article is rejected as being too long and you’ve got to cut 100 words just to fix a comma error.
On the bright side, I still get 10 bucks deposited to my PayPal account once a year.
Thank you so much for sharing your story.
Michelle
I am still in J-School and am currently writing for Suite101. I have to say that the point of writing for Suite101 is not to build “clippings,” but rather to get page views, and consequently, ad-clicks.
In online writing, SEO is god. Google is god. You are writing for SEO and google, nobody else; especially not for your personal enjoyment if you want to make a buck.
It’s not writing for print. I didn’t learn a single thing about SEO in J-School, why? Only a few of my professors knew how to operate a computer better than the students.
J-School professors are print writers, they are magazine freelancers and they are used to being paid a dollar-per-word, with no additional residual payment.
Additionally, I’d like to add that researching for SEO is not the same as researching for print. In online writing, you are advertising high-paying products. You’re not writing a news story or an opinion; although it’s preferred to have a background in writing, you don’t even have to be gramatically correct to get page views!
Remember, SEO is god. If you can write for SEO and have common search phrases appear at the top of google listings, you are a successful online writer.
And lastly, the point is not so your name will rank highly on Google. Nobody is trying to buy your name. The point is, when people are looking for products, for example, things they want to BUY, they’ll find your article and click on ads.
Print and online are not the same animal.
Thanks for these very illuminating comments. However, I’d say this: almost 100 percent of the writing I do right now is online writing and none of it is the type of writing that you describe. You can be an online writer doing what’s essentially ad copy for whatever the site is you’re writing for. Or you can be an online writer writing straight news stories, opinion pieces, etc. And IMHO, the point IS to get your name ranked high in Google searches, all the better for prospective clients to see what you’re capable of doing, or to drive traffic to your site in order to have a foundation for doing things like selling advertising, e-books, etc.
Michelle Rafter
I wrote four articles for Suite 101 early last year and then stopped when I realized the points you make in your story: 1)the standards may sound high but they are so unevenly applied that they are meaningless, and 2)I will never make money doing well researched articles that compete with floods of SEO driven sewage for page views.
I was startled just this month to have received my first $10 from them. Apparently, my page views required 18 months to accumulate to their minimum disbursal amount. Examiner.com came into town and I wrote for them a few months, but made only $30. I have learned my lesson.
I am not a beginning journalist, although I am trying to adjust to the “new reality” in publishing. Still, I can write traditional articles for print or web publications with standards and make many times a piece immediately what content mills pay for each article over my lifetime.
Interesting debate to say the least, I found 32,500 results when I googled Michelle. That’s a nice number and quantifies you in the online world as a player branding your name. If you google Seth Godin you would get 1,340,000 results for his efforts in branding his name.
Also, interesting that Recovering Content Site Writer has moved onto bigger and better things. My thoughts are that Suite 101 probably encouraged him/her to do so for obvious reasons.
There is an interesting phenomenon when a person writes for online content. Either you are researching keywords to wrap a story around for organic search results or you are positioning yourself as an authority by branding a name, or possibly for both reasons as an authority figure. For the most part both reasons are to monetize unless you are completely naive to SEO.
Michelle, I really enjoyed your article and interview with Peter Berger. Very nicely presented. How did I get here? I was not searching for your name. I was searching for Suite 101.
What I suggest is that Suite 101 offers a platform that is conducive to writers willing to learn about content creation regarding SEO with a possibility of being rewarded because they love the journey, the writing and out of the kindness of editors they are critiqued.
I don’t find this a negative thing in the least, in fact I find it refreshing that these platforms are available. The content must be original not spun by a blasted spinner that doesn’t mayo cents 2 the end Use her four back linking porpoises.
Suite 101 is an opportunity for anyone who ever thought of writing, who is interested in SEO, content creation learning a skill they have always wanted to explore, and in a years time having complete rights to their content to monetize as they wish with accreditation. What a better platform to see if you can make or break it as a writer?
The interesting objective is that everyone is gearing online writing based on Google algorithms. If you do not embrace change as a good thing regardless of your skill level and prior teachings you will be left behind the curve of prosperity.
Interesting perspective. But some of us don’t need to find out if we can make it or break it as writers, we already are. While I agree everyone whose work appears online should understand how SEO works, I personally could never see making writing web content for SEO’s sake my goal.
MVR
I freelance as a new hobby and write because I enjoy writing. I’ve worked with both of the above named companies and both have different styles & standards.
I am enjoying Suite 101’s interaction with the editorial team, they are very friendly and offer good feedback. I also understand the article goes live after the first one publishes and will be edited after it’s gone live, so that could answer how some things are posted which many not be up to par.
No one is perfect though, in my research I’ve seen many official health sites with unbelievable journalism! Not everyone follows the guidelines and what is most important is the content, knowledge and readability of the piece. If someone writes “1” instead of “one” I think we will all still wake up tomorrow & live another day!
Great article, thanks for sharing experiences!
Interesting indeed.
The lifeblood of my writing derives from “Content Mills,” since 2006. It is now late 2010 and it looks like I will finally break that triple figure salary this year; in addition, I just added Suite 101 to my online writing repertoire, only one month ago.
I would not mind an extra two-thousand per month in another 18 months or so!
Success for writing online, really takes wits. Know your audience, give them easy-to-digest information, make search engines happy and-Voila!
Print media has a hard time keeping up and so goes the “Prestigious” online publications.
Do you want to take a gander at truly atrocious writing? Skip the “content mills” and head on over, to Fox Sports. I will read a Suite 101 article any day, before attempting to digest such drivel, served on a daily platter.
If I ask, ten people to each name his favorite magazine-nine out of ten might say, “I never really thought about it.”
If I ask each to name her favorite website, she would fire back faster than lightening.
Content is a king and a dedicated content producer will make cash, real cash, which keeps on paying year after year.
That is the difference folks. There are “writers” and then you have “content producers.” The Web is well suited to the later, while print is reserved for the former. That is not to say, one cannot make a lateral move; one can, but the majority will not make the cut.
The styles are inherently different.
I started writing for Suite101.com two days ago. I have posted six 1000-word articles so far. Most of them are edited versions of spec manuscripts I wrote that have not been published elsewhere. I wrote one from scratch the other day on the Federal Reserve.
This is my first attempt to write for an Internet content site. I am treating it as if I writing for a magazine that will accept everything that I write. I find it strange that articles are reviewed after being posted, but I can live with that. I have very high standards. I know how to write, copy edit, proofread, write headlines and subheads. I write about all different topics.
I have six articles posted with 40 PVs in two-plus days. I am learning about SEO, but my focus is to write interesting articles on different subjects. I’ll see what happens.
If you are a good writer with talent and drive, Suite 101 may be a way to make some money. But it has to be more than keywords and SEO. People want to read compelling articles about different subjects. I write about various topics with authority. I’ll find out what subjects are making money soon enough.