essay mill jobs

Essay mills explained: What they are and why you should avoid them

Essays and term papers can be stressful, especially for international students who sometimes doubt their ability to research in depth and write thousands of words in English, all to a tight deadline.  

That’s where essay mills come in, exploiting the fears of students and offering to do the hard work for them in exchange for money. 

But here’s the spoiler alert - you should absolutely avoid essay mills. All the time.

They don’t work for you. They don’t even work for the essay writers themselves, and you should see that as a big warning sign. But more on that below.

What are essay mills? 

Essay mills are pretty straightforward: You pay a company to write your essay for you. The company in turn offloads the essay to a (usually freelance) writer. A couple days or weeks later, and you get your completed essay in return. 

It’s not like a proofreading service, where someone can check your spelling, grammar and citations for a fee (though even those are controversial in universities). No, essay mills offer to write you an entire essay from scratch. 

In other words, they allow students to commit academic fraud. In fact, they exploit the worries and stresses of students and entice them into cheating. They’re considered deeply unethical, and put students themselves at risk of severe punishment if caught. 

Another business model of this kind are essay banks. Here, students can buy essays that have already been written. But there’s a much higher risk of getting caught for plagiarism, since who knows how many hundreds or thousands of people have used that very same essay. 

Are essay mills legal or illegal?

The legality of essay mills depends on where you go to university, but the unethicality is clear no matter the location. Here’s a quick rundown of essay mills’ legal status in popular study abroad countries:  

Anti - essay mill legislation in the UK was passed in the House of Commons in February 2021, and will soon be made law. It’s not totally illegal yet, but it’s just a matter of time. 

The Republic of Ireland has also passed a number of bills to help tackle essay mills, while the practice is totally illegal in Australia and New Zealand. 

As for the USA and Canada, some US states have made them illegal, while Canada is under mounting pressure to follow suit.  

But the content and nuances of these laws changes from place to place. For example, in some US states it’s illegal for the student to use them, whereas the bills in Ireland, the UK, New Zealand and Australia are an attempt to criminalise essay mill companies themselves.

However, when we talk about legality, we’re of course talking about the law. But just because you might not cause a criminal offense by using essay mills, it’s still academic fraud and/or plagiarism. And getting caught for that can come with some dire consequences. 

Long story short, you really shouldn’t use them, regardless of their legality. 

Why you should avoid essay mills

1. if it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense.

The writer's pay is awful. I mean really bad. Trust me -- I write for a living, and I’ve seen hundreds of advertisements for essay mill jobs. Every time I see one I can’t believe how little money the writers make for so much time and effort.  

But does this affect you? Totally! Would you care about doing great work if, a) the money was terrible, and b) it wouldn’t take you anywhere in your career? I know I wouldn’t...

Let’s talk about cost and time to put this into some perspective. The price range of essay mills varies wildly depending on the writers they employ. You can pay anywhere between £10-£35 per page. Roll this out over a 10 page essay, and it could be anywhere between £100 and £350 for the final product. But you can also come across offers for much, much less money than this.

While that higher end of £350 might seem like a lot of money, trust me -- it’s really nothing for the amount of research, writing, citations, editing and proofreading required. 

If £100 per day is considered a “just fine but not great” sum of money in the UK, a writer would have to do all the work on your essay in 2.5 days just to make it worthwhile. And they’d have to do it without the subject knowledge that you have. 

2. The writers aren’t subject experts

Think about it: if they were a subject expert, would they really be working for a shady company that facilitates cheating? Not a chance. 

The main point is that these writers are badly underpaid and they’re not experts, therefore they’re putting very little effort or expertise into your essay. They just want to do it as quickly as possible before moving onto the next one. 

3. There’s no guarantee of a good grade

None. Since the writers are underpaid, lack expertise and rush their work, it’s a recipe for a bad final product. Multiple studies have shown that essay mills do mediocre work at best. 

The essay you pay hundreds of pounds for might get you a pass grade, but you could do much better yourself. 

4. The punishment is harsh

Every university has severe laws on plagiarism and academic fraud, which is the exact result of using an essay mill. At its most lenient, a student caught breaking rules on plagiarism will receive no grade at all for the work, but at worst they can be suspended or even expelled from your university.  

But the perfect “crime” goes unnoticed, right? Well, it’s unlikely in this case. 

5. Essay mills and detection services

Most universities use pretty innovative plagiarism detection software these days, which can pick up on any hint of fraudulent work. Thus, the risk of getting caught is very high. And by the time a student does get caught, they’ve already lost their hard earned cash to the essay mill company. 

6. Essay mills don’t care about you

The company doesn’t care about you, and nor does the writer. That’s a pretty bad starting point for doing business! Once they’ve got their money and done their sub-standard work, they can move on to exploiting someone else’s fears. 

7. There’s a risk of scams 

Most essay mill sites demand a deposit of the final amount, or sometimes the entire fee up front. Either way, you won’t see your essay until you’ve paid them something. This makes it a prime opportunity for scam artists to take your money without giving anything in return. 

You see, it’s extremely easy for scam artists to launch a website advertising essays for sale, then just shut the operation down once they’ve made some quick cash without doing any work. 

Speaking of scams, here’s an article on some other international student scams to watch out for !

8. There’s a risk of bribery too

And then there’s the risk of bribery. Even if a student thinks they’re anonymous while dealing with essay mills, they’re not. There’s an email address, bank account name, even their IP address to worry about. 

So if the company or the writer decides that they want to blackmail or bribe a student by threatening to unveil the truth, they can. And they’ll always be able to.  

A final word on essay mills: Honest work is the best work

It sounds old fashioned, but there’s no replacement for smart, hard, honest work. Any student can write a great term paper or essay assignment on their own. All it takes is time, research, and some focus. 

Even if you’re under pressure or lack some confidence in your English ability, there are so many better ways to deal with it. Use a study abroad education counsellor , speak to your teachers and your friends. They’ll be able to point you in the right direction and help make that essay easier. 

As for essay mills? Forget about them. They’re exploitative, they serve no good purpose, and you can do a better job yourself!

So you’re thinking about studying abroad? Great! Check out the range of amazing courses available through Edvoy. Click here to get started or click the button below!

Guest Author

Sean is a freelance writer, copywriter & editor from Ireland.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions shared in this site solely belong to the individual authors and do not necessarily represent t ...Read More

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December 12th, 2017

The crumbling façade: my experience working for an essay mill.

10 comments | 4 shares

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

According to a recent UK Government-backed review, academics are topping up their earnings by writing for “essay mill” sites which help students to cheat in their assignments. S. A. Mills was one of those academics and recounts the experience here; offering an insight into the allure of such opportunities for those either out of work or in precarious positions, as well as the transactional nature of working for these services and with their clients.

Please note the author’s name has been changed.

New proposals to crack down on “essay mill” sites are arguably overdue. This is a £100 million industry largely cornered by online companies. These essay mill companies provide the service of “ contract cheating ” for students willing to pay for someone else to write their coursework. That someone else is, in effect, a “ ghost writer ”.

I was such a ghost writer. I was not familiar with essay mills or contract cheating when, having Googled “academic writer”, I found details of the post online. The notice merely asked those interested to provide a resumé, brief covering letter, and copy of their academic certificates. At the time I had been without income for a number of months. Because I was in need of some – any – income, it seemed a reasonable option, especially after having had several unsuccessful interviews for academic jobs. Having signed up, I received meagre fees to produce “ model essays ”, competing with other academics for writing briefs while I looked for my next post.

Model essay

The telephone “interview” was far from demanding. Perhaps anticipating concerns, the company sought to offer some reassurance with what seemed a stock response: my job would be to produce model essays that would support clients to produce their own work. Anyone found using the service for an illegitimate purpose would be in breach of company policy and be banned from using the service again. If this was an honest intention it would have been easy to police. But in reality, incidents of misuse were seemingly ignored. For example, on several occasions I had the opportunity to improve a piece of work to a higher grade than previously received. More than once, what I was expected to improve was identical to what I had submitted earlier. The client had not engaged with it but rather passed it of as their own and, tellingly, the company had not taken any action.

I could bid for as many or as few pieces of work at a time as I wanted, on whatever subject areas took my interest, provided I could make a reasonable case that I had the expertise to write. Aside from providing an income, I saw the work as a chance to brush up on areas I had previously been interested in, and to learn newish areas while getting paid. I think I produced good work more often than not, taking pride in several of the pieces I submitted. Indeed, there were some I would have been proud to have put my name to. Other times I would go for “C” grade work and write something quick and dirty that was simply passable. Being asked to produce model work to a particular standard seemed somewhat strange, but when you have bills to pay you tend not to enquire.

Image credit: Drummond Mill Chimney by Tim Green. This work is licensed under a CC BY 2.0 license.

Quality control and alterations

The process did not end when I submitted the essay. Usually, the work would be “quality controlled” within 48 hours. Because this could require a quick turnaround, it often left me chained to my email, waiting to hear if changes were necessary. I considered quality control to be more of a quantitative, tick-box exercise, because whenever I was even one word short of 50 below what was stipulated I would incur a fee adjustment. Spelling and grammar were other targets. My observation was that more often than not there was much less focus on the substance of the content. The company would argue that the fee reflected the expense of having to check and recheck the brief – something about duplicated effort, and time spent sending a quality control failure email, etc. The financial penalty was one thing, but this seemed an odd way of doing academia – through financial punishment. It was disparaging and an insult to my capabilities as an academic. But then these companies are not remotely “academic”.

The purpose of the model essay as a learning tool was most clearly contradicted by the process of meeting the client’s alteration requests. Clients were permitted to request amendments to work within a specified timeframe after submission. It was reasonable for clients to request changes if the writer had failed to capture the initial essay question. If the demand was invalid (e.g. asking for something not in the initial brief) or made after the specified timeframe, this would carry an additional fee payable to the writer. I would be asked if I wanted to tackle the alterations and also to suggest the additional fee, up to a certain point. The company would then, I understand, charge the client three times that amount.

The process required me to refer to tracked changes and comments, which I found odd, to say the least, as on reading the requests I wondered why the student – who at the outset was supposed to be “competent but just lacking in their English writing/grammar” – suddenly appeared so clued up on the changes to be made. It would be reasonable to ask why the student did not just make the changes her/himself, or even why she/he hadn’t just written the work in the first place. It was not difficult to draw the conclusion that I was not only writing students’ coursework but almost certainly also rewriting it based on supervisor comments. The model essay was a façade.

On the few occasions I worked on Master’s degree works, I had contact with the client via a telephone link. For all undergraduate works a company buffer would serve as an email intermediary. On being asked to write amendments, I would work from both the feedback of the marker and the client’s requests. The latter were often easy to spot as they were so poorly written, leading me to assume many were students whose first language was not English. On several occasions I was explicitly provided work for students in a foreign country.

It is expected that clients use the model essay to learn and be inspired to write their own coursework . There is nothing illegal in firms providing such a service, nor in me or others producing such works, at the time of writing. The onus is on the clients to use the service correctly. If she/he used the product for the incorrect purpose of plagiarism, she or he alone was in the wrong legally. I cannot put a figure on what percentage actually used it for the intended purpose or not. I do wonder how clients interacted with the “model essay” and what role they perceived it to have.

Ghost-writing was not a lucrative post. To earn anything approaching a liveable income required writing as many works as possible. I would have to work on three or four briefs per week, for which I would be lucky to make £300. Because it was a seasonal business, with peaks and troughs, I would grab every opportunity. During peak periods (March-June and around Christmas) I would barely take a day off as there would be a constant stream of briefs to complete; often four or more per week, ranging from 1,000 words to 5,000. This left very little time for job hunting; leaving me in a vicious cycle.

The empire strikes back

In October, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), the university standards watchdog, proposed UK Government-backed guidance to address these issues. There is now a move to address the matter of academics who write model essays as a means of topping up their income . Academic work is, for many, precarious, with short-term contract posts and staff redundancy. The work I did was between posts to provide my sole income because working for an essay mill was a better option than benefits. But there are academics with posts who will use it as a chance to supplement their salaries , particularly if they are not well-paid.

Douglas Blackstock, the Chief Executive of the QAA has noted how “you wouldn’t want a lawyer representing you in a court case [if they had not passed their Law degree on their own]. If it was a medical related profession or something that [impacted on] public safety – that is such a dangerous thing”. But actually, the problem begins when the student applies to a university, with ghost writers often employed to write the personal statement in support of their application. This is another service available to students, and one that I provided. Apart from the obvious problem of students gaining entry at least partly on the basis of statements written by other people, the possibility exists that these companies are gathering repeat customers as the same students seek model essays.

Essay mills are businesses providing a product to be used in academia. They do not provide an academic service, because there is no engagement with the student to provide training – the only interaction being financial. These private companies have identified a demand that can be met, and do so handsomely.

If a student is struggling with coursework demands, or truly finds writing difficult, spending their way out of the challenge should not be the answer. But knowledge is for sale and so this might seem a natural option. This problem will probably not go away by merely ensuring more student support from overstretched lecturers because the use of essay mills is a normalised and viable option for some. The problem of online cheating is deeper and more pervasive than first thought.

Please note the author’s name has been changed.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Impact Blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our  comments policy  if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

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10 Comments

If the essays are truly intended as model essays (!), then to avoid them being submitted as final pieces of work, could there be an obligation for the companies to register the papers with a service like iThenticate/TurnItIn, so that cheating via this mechanism would be detected? In that case, a student could still seek the support of a model essay (leaving aside the various questions that that activity provokes), but they would be unable to then directly use the paper. It’s likely, of course, that this would cause a huge downturn in business for these companies, but that would also be the point – but it would only be using their own arguments to create greater regulation.

If language is the primary issue for students to seek such papers, then there would still be an opportunity for the provision of language polishing services, which would be legitimate, as long as the core work was fundamentally unchanged – although that in turn would be quite hard to monitor.

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Before cracking down on essay mills for students, if just to avoid the hypocrisy, perhaps we should crack down on academic writing services for their professors.

These services vary widely in their scope. At one end there is proof-reading and copy-editing. At the other end, researchers can pay to have others essentially conduct all the research except data gathering. It can start with writing a proposal, continuing with data analysis, “co-writing”, “re-writing””, submitting the paper, addressing the reviewer’s comments, and producing a revised version.

If you want more disturbing details, please look up “Ethics of Using Language Editing Services in An Era of Digital Communication and Heavily Multi-Authored Papers” and references therein.

It looks the business model of cheating for hire is slowly but surely dying (good news for students and academic institutions) – essayscam.org/forum/wc/panicking-research-orders-students-down-5788/

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Essay mills are a symptom of wider problems- universities expanding too fast and taking on students like water, with no regard as to teaching quality and support services. Not all students are fit to go to university. Also, one-on-one academic support is practically nonexistent, especially in places like the LSE. Hence nobody’s familiar with the students’ writing style, making it easier to cheat. But it’s easier to go after the essay mills than the universities, right?

I also think that it is necessary first of all to deal with the structure of education itself and then move on to other issues.

I have read with dismay some of the comments on this post over the last year. It seems an obvious rebuttal to make the claim that contract cheating is part of the more endemic problem of the free market in academia. No-one would doubt that Academia has many problems, but I think to say that this justifies essay mills is disingenuous.

The companies only exist because there is a reserve pool of academic labour either unemployed or underemployed, and because there are students willing to pay to cheat their way through University. This is a problem of the free market in Academia. But to blame the symptom (contract cheating) on the problem (free market), seems to me a flawed argument.

The companies might offer a defence that the product they offer is well meaning and only wrong when abused by the student passing it off as their own. This merely deflects their responsibility and perpetuates the pretence that are not at fault.

The companies might say that banning them would not stop students from cheating in other ways. But it might reduce the magnitude of the problem of student cheating. Such companies are probably less concerned with the problem of cheating than their financial books, which is understandable. Of course, they will want to make as much money as they can from this revenue for as long as possible.

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f the essays are truly intended as model essays (!), then to avoid them being submitted as final pieces of work, could there be an obligation for the companies to register the papers with a service like iThenticate/TurnItIn, so that cheating via this mechanism would be detected?

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Back to school

Inside a highly lucrative, ethically questionable essay-writing service

Killer Papers is a seven-figure academic “paper mill” business. But its products are just for inspiration, its founder insists.

Kevin says he’s always been known as a good writer — a reputation that only blossomed in his Canadian high school.

“Word spread pretty quick around my 700-person school that I’m the best writer in the school,” he recalls.

The word spread to 15-year-old Kevin’s workplace, McDonald’s, where he flipped burgers. His teenage colleagues began joking with him, saying they’d pay $20 for him to write their papers. “It sounded funny at first,” Kevin says. “Then eventually, I was like: Twenty bucks? That’s more than I make in three hours .”

So he said yes.

Kevin (an alias) estimates he wrote around 50 papers for his high school classmates before moving on to college in the Northeast U.S. There, he worked at the university’s writing center and tutored fellow students in economics. After graduating, he got a job in finance and recommenced his paper-writing hustle, this time for college students.

“The stereotypical [client] is ‘ daddy’s credit card.’ But the vast majority of the people that use the service — and I’m talking 90 percent — have a job .”

In December 2016, he formalized his essay-writing services, launching an Instagram profile and website that he called Killer Papers . Kevin wrote the first hundred or so papers for free. “I did it just to get reviews and knowing that word would spread eventually,” he says. It worked.

By August 2017, he was charging $10 per page, and he’d earned enough to quit his full-time job, which he hated. “That first year, I made $50,000 from the business,” he says.

Killer Papers, based in Canada, is one of a number of so-called essay mills that write papers for clients in exchange for money. And as kids head back to school this fall, business in the industry is about to pick up. “A slow month is August, and a busy month is October,” Kevin says.

He now has around 60 writers who produce between 200 and a thousand papers a month, with prices ranging from $17.50 to $32 per page. Though Kevin is coy about sharing specific numbers, he will allow that the site’s revenue is in “the low seven figures.”

With paper mills, the quality of the end product varies wildly, depending on which service you use and what price you pay. The Killer Papers site emphasizes that its writers “are ALL American or Canadian college graduates,” in contrast to cheaper overseas competitors that employ writers for whom English is a second language.

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But Killer Papers isn’t a paper mill, the company insists. “Killer Papers is a tutoring service,” reads a disclaimer on the site. “KillerPapers.org custom projects are not intended to be forwarded as finalized work for academic credit as they are only strictly meant to be used for research and study purposes. Killer Papers does not endorse or condone any type of plagiarism.”

Those who use Killer Paper’s services generally fall into two camps. “The stereotypical one is ‘daddy’s credit card,’” Kevin says. But that isn’t his core customer base. “The vast majority of the people that use the service — and I’m talking 90 percent — have a job. A lot of them are older than you might expect.” They’re people, Kevin says, whose busy lives mean they don’t have the proper amount of time to dedicate to their classwork.

Killer Papers user Deke (not his real name), a 24-year-old from Texas, was more of the stereotype than the average customer. He first heard about the service from a friend during his freshman year of college, where he was studying marketing. Deke estimates that he paid more than $1,000 for around 10 papers. “I know I spent a pretty penny, and that’s probably because I’m fortunate enough to have family support me on the financial side,” he says.

Deke says he used Killer Papers to help him with his heavy course load, which he took on so he could expedite his entry into the working world. He admits he never told his family where their hard-earned cash was going. “Even if I tried to explain to them, they’re immigrants and didn’t really go to school,” he says. “They wouldn’t really comprehend it.”

Deke claims he never submitted a paper that wasn’t his own work. “When I got the papers back, I tweaked them,” Deke says. “I worked on them.” He says that the essay-writing service helped him come up with the concepts and ideas for his essays. “That’s where I really needed help. When it came to opening up a Word document to type stuff, I just kind of blanked out. I’m like, Where do I start? ”

Deke got As for every essay he submitted except for one — the result of an uber-strict professor, he says. He graduated in 2020 and started working for an NFL team; he’s now employed in the oil and gas industry. “It helped me out pretty well in terms of getting me to where I am now,” he says. He adds that his fear of the blank page has disappeared, and he’s able to proficiently write reports for his job.

Ethical questions

Passing off someone else’s work as your own — plagiarism — isn’t illegal. But it is unethical.

Thomas Lancaster, senior teaching fellow in computing at Imperial College London, has been studying academic integrity, and essay mills’ role in destroying it, for more than 20 years. “Students see lots of temptation,” he says. “They see offers to do work for them, often disguised in the form of saying it’s ‘support’ or ‘help,’ not directly linking itself to being cheating. A lot of this is deceptive, and there’s a lot of blurring the lines between cheating and acceptability.”

Beyond the impact paper mills have on the value of academic degrees, Lancaster worries about the effect they have on students. “For students who think they’re just buying one piece of work, the problem is they then miss out on some of the core foundational knowledge we expect them to have,” he says. “When they go on to do a later assignment, they just struggle to do it.”

“We’re informing clients before they sign up that we’re not encouraging them to plagiarize anything.”

Those involved in essay-writing services deny that they’re damaging the integrity of the educational system. Courtney, who is in her 20s and lives on the East Coast, has been working with Killer Papers since 2018. She was an English and education undergrad at college and moved into teaching kids. “I felt very confident in my ability to proofread and edit and provide pretty much any writing service,” she says. “I just really enjoy writing.”

She signed up for Killer Papers, she says, because while she felt confident in her ability to craft an essay, she was conscious others might not. “I really liked the idea that it was providing support for students who might not have the same skill set that I had,” she says. “It felt nice to be able to help people.”

In March 2022, she left her job teaching and became a full-time essay writer for Killer Papers. In part, it was the money, but she also felt like the pandemic’s disruption of education meant she couldn’t make as much of an impact on kids’ learning as she wanted to. She tries to write between 15 and 30 assignments a week, depending on length. That allows her to match her $45,000 teacher’s salary, she says.

When she’s asked how she feels about the morality of what she does, Courtney demurs. “We’re informing clients before they sign up that we’re not encouraging them to plagiarize anything,” she says. “And we’re not encouraging them to submit any work.” Kevin, Killer Papers’ founder, makes similar points. “They’re assigned limited usage rights,” he says. “Basically, it’s for inspiration or study purposes. You’re not allowed to reuse it or anything like that.”

Kevin says that you wouldn’t hold a gun manufacturer liable for what someone does with a firearm so you shouldn’t hold Killer Papers liable for any students who decide to submit work the service produces as their own. “Everybody has free will,” he says.

When Input points out that many people do think gun manufacturers should be held liable, Kevin counters that you wouldn’t hold alcohol producers responsible for the actions of someone who’s drunk. When Input points out that cigarettes are similar — and that the tobacco industry has been held liable for its impact — and asks whether he really doesn’t believe kids aren’t passing off his essays as their own, Kevin asks to go off the record.

Courtney holds the line firm. “It’s fabulous to support students any way that they need, but in the same way that I couldn’t control my students in the classroom not submitting homework, I also can’t control what a student does with content that’s been submitted to them,” she says. “They’ve signed an agreement that they’ve read on the site, and they see we’re not condoning it in the slightest.”

“ People in general assume that I really don’t care about the product I’m producing, and I’m just doing as many as possible to make money. That’s just not accurate .”

That she’s part of an industry fueling cheating is the biggest misconception people have about her work, she says. “People in general assume that I really don’t care about the product I’m producing, and I’m just doing as many as possible to make money,” she says. “That’s just not accurate. I genuinely care about supporting students, and I want them to feel confident in the process.

“I encourage feedback,” she continues. “I encourage questions and critiques and everything, because not only does that help me to improve, but it makes them feel more comfortable that I’m not just some robot or some random individual with no other purpose than a paycheck.” Such communication happens via a chat function on the website.

Kevin’s vision for the future of Killer Papers is a confusing one. “I don’t see a world where three years from now we’re still selling custom essays, to be honest with you,” he says. Instead, he foresees the essay-writing service disappearing, to be replaced by bona fide tutoring services. Meaning Killer Papers may someday rebrand. “We need a name that transcends essay writing, to be something that can compete with [high-profile online tutoring service] Varsity Tutors,” he says.

Perhaps it’s a tacit admission that he wants to go totally legit. In a pre-interview email to Input , Kevin struck a more reflective tone regarding what he does for a living. “The reason I thought I picked this business initially is because I was good at writing, I liked writing, and people were willing to pay me to do it,” he shares.

“But the truth is, I picked it because I was desperate and knew I had what it took to make it work, at least enough to get me out of the corporate job and two-hour commute I hated,” Kevin continues. “If I hadn’t been so desperate, maybe I’d be changing the world right now.”

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Essay mills: university course work to order

David matthews investigates the scale and threat of the custom essay industry.

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The damage contract cheating can inflict on society is clear. Graduates emerge from university with huge (and in some disciplines, potentially dangerous) gaps in their learning and knowledge

Picture the following scenario: marking an essay by one of your more underwhelming students, you grow suspicious. You would like to be pleased by the unexpected quality of the work, but instead you feel “a twinge that a sentence is too neatly framed”, as one scholar who has found herself in this position puts it. The analysis is superb, the writing style good - but is it too good? It bears little resemblance to previous work by the same student: indeed, it is in a different league. But it has been through Turnitin, the academic plagiarism checker, and come back clean. Has the student miraculously improved, or are you looking at a particularly pernicious problem afflicting today’s higher education sector: the paid- for, custom-written essay?

Custom essays, usually bought through websites known as essay mills, are in some ways an academic’s worst nightmare. Unlike standard examples of copy-and-paste plagiarism, they cannot be detected using software because they are “original” pieces of work - just not the student’s. They also arguably represent an even more cynical form of cheating than, for example, regurgitating unattributed passages in a piece of submitted work.

For many years, essay mills have been brazenly advertising their wares online, although they are always careful not to condone customers handing in bought pieces of work, arguing that the essays purchased are intended simply as useful guides or reference material.

No one knows how big the market in custom essays is, or whether universities are managing to detect those students who do hand them in. There are also concerns that in an age of mass higher education and high student-to-staff ratios, lecturers are less able to get to know their students’ work, making this form of cheating more difficult to detect. And there are fears that the pressures of the job might encourage some academics to turn a blind eye to the practice. But perhaps the most important question is whether it is possible to prevent this form of cheating in the first place.

Asking how many custom-written essays are being bought and sold in the UK is a bit like asking “how long is a piece of string?”, argues Thomas Lancaster, senior lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University . For obvious reasons (including the fact that cheats do not want to be caught, essay mills operate online, and there are no official statistics), it is difficult to come by reliable figures.

However, Lancaster, along with his former colleague Robert Clarke, has attempted to quantify the scale of the problem.

The pair studied a large sample of essay mill sites between March 2005 and June 2013, and identified nearly 19,000 attempts at contract cheating by students.

While they examined websites that could be used by anyone anywhere in the world, a more detailed study of 59 postings in 2011 on one website, vworker.com, found 18 references to assignments at UK universities.

“What we detected is the tip of the iceberg,” cautions Lancaster. No one even knows how many essay ghostwriting sites there are on the web, but five years ago Lancaster and Clarke listed 158.

In addition to the online activity, there is an unknown number of essay writers who advertise their work offline - even on campus.

“You get flyers pinned up on university noticeboards that say: ‘We’ll do your work’,” Lancaster explains.

Then there are those who arrange contract essays socially, for friends, family members or students one or two years below them, who leave no public trace at all.

Prices vary dramatically. An upper-second, five-page undergraduate history essay will set you back £70 at the cheaper end of the market, but some sites charge in the region of £150-£160. One website, which sells itself as a “premier” service, charges £50 an hour. This may sound expensive, but it is loose change compared with the cost (particularly for international students) of having to retake a year.

At the top end of the scale, postgraduate dissertations of 25,000 words cost in the region of £2,800.

Some essay writing companies are willing to provide more specific estimates of the scale of demand for their services, although the figures are self-reported and some academics say that the firms may exaggerate their popularity to attract publicity and gain more custom.

Jennifer Wiss, business development manager at All Answers (which trades under a number of names on the web, including UKessays.com), says that the company dispatched 11,470 custom essays in 2012, of which three-quarters were ordered from UK IP addresses.

This figure is difficult to verify, but the firm’s accounts appear to be consistent with a company selling essays in such quantities.

Wiss estimates that a further 4,000 custom essays are written in the UK by rival agencies each year (although students at British universities can also order from abroad).

In 2005 Barclay Littlewood, who was then chief executive of All Answers (which promoted itself as UK Essays), estimated that the business was worth £200 million a year and boasted that it had allowed him to buy a Ferrari and a Lamborghini.

Robert Eaglestone, professor of contemporary literature and thought at Royal Holloway, University of London , believes that custom-written essays are a problem, but thinks that some essay mills choose to exaggerate their size through the press “because it’s good advertising. It’s a very media- friendly problem.”

Whatever the number of essays being commissioned and the scale of the companies involved, information gathered by Times Higher Education under the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the number of custom-written essays being detected and officially reported is tiny.

THE asked UK universities to provide details of the number of students they had disciplined in the academic years 2011-12 and 2012-13 for handing in custom essays or assignments bought from essay mills. Among the universities that responded to the request within 20 days, just 29 students were disciplined in 2011-12; in 2012-13, 30 students from 15 institutions were penalised.

More than half the offenders hailed from outside the UK. Some argue that the high fees paid by international students and the need to write in English (if this is not their first language) create greater incentives to cheat.

Chasing plagiarists can be ‘too much effort’, Carroll says. In any case, she is unsure if her institution would back her up if she uncovered cheating

Wiss reports that for a significant number of All Answers’ customers, English is a second language. She claims that “many of these struggle to put their thoughts and ideas across, or to interpret their course material and lectures. I believe this is why they choose to use a service like ours.”

In Lancaster’s experience, both domestic and international students use essay writing services, but he believes that a particularly serious and related issue is the matter of students paying for the translation of an essay written in a foreign language before handing it in, a practice that can obscure plagiarism. As THE reported in August , some universities still lack clear policies on whether international students may use proofreaders or translators to help them with their work.

The damage contract cheating can inflict on society is clear. Graduates emerge from university with huge (and in some disciplines, potentially dangerous) gaps in their learning and knowledge. Lancaster even discovered one student who had attempted to outsource an assignment on nuclear engineering. One of the scholar’s presentations on the subject asks: “Do you want to live within five miles of this person?”

But there is also a more specific form of damage to the university. You need only one student to go “to a job and not be able to do it” for an employer to “write off” other graduates of that university, Lancaster argues. He believes that employers have long memories and will warn other companies that certain alumni are not to be trusted. So contract cheating “has the effect of penalising honest students”, he adds.

Given the ethical issues, who agrees to work for the sites? The companies advertise themselves as employing graduates with good qualifications: an anonymous essay writer who wrote for THE in August says he is a recent Oxbridge graduate who was asked to provide evidence of his qualifications and samples of his writing when applying for the job. Some companies claim to employ staff with at least 2:1 degrees, interview potential candidates and ask them to complete trial assignments.

Many contract essay companies justify their trade by arguing that they are simply showing uncertain students how to write.

“Many students just want to see how it’s done,” says Wiss, who also claims that the “vast majority” of All Answers’ customers do not hand in their purchased essays.

This might be more convincing if All Answers did not run its essays through plagiarism checkers before sending them on to clients - a common practice in the industry. Why do this unless customers want to hand them in? Wiss claims that this is to make sure that its writers are “spending the time they are paid for on the project and not cutting corners”.

In line with many in the business, All Answers tries to blame universities for the rise of the essay mill. Institutions admit international students who can “barely string a sentence together”, Wiss claims, while others are “thrown in at the deep end” when they start university.

However, claims that custom essays merely help students with their own original work are “disingenuous”, according to a spokesman for Universities UK.

“Such essays often cost several hundred pounds, will specify the grade they require [2:1, 2:2, etc] and are purchased invariably to meet clear deadlines,” he says.

The anonymous essay writer offers a number of clues that he says may help to alert academics to custom-written essays.

Essay writing agencies generally require writers to submit their work in a standard format, he explains, often including a contents page and chapter headings, regardless of length.

“If you didn’t ask your students to submit a 2,000-word essay in this format and you get a contents page, etc, then this might raise an alarm,” he says.

Ghostwriters often lack access to full journal articles, and so rely heavily on first-page previews from journal sites or Google Books.

“Really probe the references, because this is the weak part,” he advises.

Jude Carroll, an education consultant at Oxford Brookes University and a plagiarism expert , thinks academics should not be afraid to be aggressively “investigative” if they smell a rat. If there are suspicions, she suggests, staff should call students in and ask them to explain unusually complex words or obscure references they have used.

The “biggest worry” for academics who have such suspicions is that they lack proof, she says - but that is no excuse for inaction.

“There’s no support for the argument about proof. Students can’t question academic judgements. You don’t have to be [100 per cent] sure, you have to weigh the balance of probabilities - and be at least 65 per cent sure,” she thinks.

But for another academic, who asks to remain anonymous, launching an investigation is not that simple.

“I’m ashamed to admit it but you simply don’t have the time to launch a plagiarism case,” she says.

One colleague, the same academic recalls, had to “almost google every line” of a suspect essay and make several trips to the library to ascertain whether her fears about a piece of work were genuine.

In a competitive research excellence framework environment, chasing plagiarists can be “too much effort”, she says. In any case, she is also unsure if her institution would back her up if she uncovered cheating. Universities have a “real anxiety about the litigation culture” and are “anxious” about academics exercising their judgement.

When offenders do get caught, Carroll says, the punishments for handing in contracted essays are “highly variable”. She finds this worrying because penalties are a major determinant of how likely students are to cheat.

“I believe students should be thrown out” if caught, she says. “It’s fraud.”

However, according to the results of THE ’s FoI request, most students who cheat in this manner can expect to remain on their courses.

Of the 59 students who were caught handing in bought essays in 2011-12 and 2012-13, just 13 were expelled. In one case at Newcastle University , for example, an international student suspected of handing in work purchased from the site Essays.uk.com was given a “final written warning” but no other punishment.

Many believe that academics’ first line of defence against custom essays is to set assignments that are difficult, if not impossible, to outsource. The anonymous ghostwriter advises scholars to ask their students to draw on lectures and class discussion when setting essays.

“This is something that is either less visible or invisible to the ghostwriter,” he explains, and therefore much more difficult to achieve.

Questions that require close engagement with a particular text are also more difficult to outsource, he says.

“Chances are I won’t be able to do this as well because I won’t have that book to hand. If asked to, I have a problem.”

He also cautions against sending out lecture notes in electronic formats or putting them online, because this only makes it easier for ghostwriters to give the impression of having attended courses.

However, the Equality Challenge Unit points out that students with disabilities might find taking notes during lectures difficult or even impossible, and some departments require academics to provide lecture notes to all students for this reason.

Some essay questions appear time and time again, making them easier for contract writers to complete, so one obvious piece of advice from plagiarism experts is to avoid setting assignments on predictable topics such as “women in Dickens”.

Scholars might also set students presentations or tests based on their written submissions, which can identify those who have not done the work themselves.

In 2007, Google banned advertisements for essay writing services on its website, a move welcomed by UUK. Couldn’t the government introduce a blanket ban on the companies?

A spokeswoman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills suggests that this would be impossible under current law.

“Whether a student and/or ‘writing service’ have committed an offence would be for a court to decide and depend on the individual circumstances of the case,” she says. “There is no action BIS could take to address this.”

Another drastic option is suggested by the tale of a US professor, recounted by Lancaster, who set himself up as a contract essay writer to test the waters, only to find one of his own assignments out to tender. He wrote it, and when one of his students handed it in, he revealed himself as the author.

Wiss maintains that All Answers is “very keen to work with universities to provide a service that can’t be abused in the first place” - but only if universities agree that the company is “a legitimate source of academic help”.

The UUK spokesman declines to comment on this and says: “More should be done to clamp down on these essay companies.”

He adds that the body does not have any specific proposals to tackle the problem (although suggestions are welcome).

So there does not appear to be any systematic solution to essay mills on the horizon, and responsibility for detecting and dealing with the issue continues to rest with individual academics and their universities.

“If academics really want to catch these essays, they are going to have to spend more time engaging with their students’ submitted work,” concludes the anonymous essay writer. Some may be left wishing that they had more time to do just that.

Nothing to hide (except your details)

“Although using our service is not cheating, and you have nothing to hide if you use the service responsibly, we still take your privacy very seriously … We never share details of your order with your university.” Oxbridge Essays

“First class in my chemistry coursework was unbelievable!!! thanks.” - Theo, Manchester My Uni Essays

“Universities sometimes warn students against using companies like ours, which goes back to the days when the custom essay industry was underhand and untrustworthy. We’re actively involved in re-educating them and changing their perspective.” All Answers

“Just wanted to send a note to say thanks. Your paper helped me get a 2:1 for my degree!! I can now apply for my Masters! Thanks ever so much!! Do you write to Masters level?” - Lucy, Stratford-upon-Avon Ivory Research

How to exorcise the ghostwriters

• Set students short tests or presentations based on their essays.
• Ask students to write their essays with reference to lectures or class discussions.
• Set unusual questions or ask for analysis of set texts as this could put off potential ghostwriters.
• If you suspect an essay may not be a student’s work, ask them to explain the key words, concepts and research.
• Check references: ghostwriters often do not have access to full journals or books, so may be able to reference only the preview pages of online articles.
• If an essay seems overly formatted, for example, with a contents page and chapters, this could be because of a standard format used by essay companies.
• Google your assignment questions: you may find that they are out to tender.
• Click here for more on preventing plagiarism.

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Straight Talk From an Essay Mill Insider: Part 1 of 2

An Interview with David Tomar, Former Essay Mill Writer and Author of The Shadow Scholar

This is the conclusion of our interview with Dave Tomar, a former essay mill writer, current anti-cheating activist, and author of The Shadow Scholar . Part 1 may be read here.

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Dave Tomar is an author and journalist who has written extensively on music and education. Tomar catapulted to notoriety with his controversial and eye-opening 2010 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "The Shadow Scholar." Writing under the pseudonym Ed Dante (a name now committed to perpetuity by its own Wikipedia entry ), Tomar highlighted his decade-long career from 2001 to 2011 as an academic ghostwriter while simultaneously announcing his retirement from the business.

"The Shadow Scholar" became the most read article in the history of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Although student cheating is nothing new, this article underscored the extent to which student cheating had become a business, in which students paid others to do their work, sometimes for an entire course. Tomar’ s revelations led to appearances on ABC World News Tonight, Nightline, and the Today Show. There he shared the ghostwriting business’s trade secrets and attempted to bring greater awareness to this hidden epidemic of student cheating.

Since then, Tomar has focused not just on exposing the broader failures in American education but also on reforming it.

TURNITIN: Thank you so much for taking the time for an interview with us. The issue of contract cheating is both simple and complex--and hearing your stories really helps us personalize the impact. You wrote a book called The Shadow Scholar published by Bloomsbury in 2012. Why did you write it? For whom did you write it?

DAVE TOMAR : For the better part of a decade, I made my living writing papers for students. So when people asked me what I did for work, I’d say, “I help people cheat for money.”

Not pretty, I admit. But it was the easiest way to explain it… and I guess that explanation lends itself to further conversation, at least more so than being an insurance adjustor or a mortgage agent. People always had a ton of follow-up questions:

• That really happens?
• You’ll write about anything?
• Where the hell were you when I was in college?

Over time, I learned that most people had no idea essay mills even existed. I also came to see, over time, that contract cheating was symptomatic of a lot of toxic systemic issues in higher education: exorbitant tuition rates; exploding student loan debt; an alarming preponderance of college students who simply aren’t academically prepared.

In the scope of all these things, it seemed like contract cheating was something people should know about. The Shadow Scholar was my way of exposing this practice to the world.

Of course, I was also exposing myself to the world. I saw a lot that was wrong with academia. But I couldn’t hide from the fact that I was also responsible for contributing to it. I knew I had to get out. The Shadow Scholar seemed like my escape, a closing statement on my decade as a cheater for hire.

I’ve spent most of my time since then paying penance for my misdeeds by shining a light on the contract cheating industry and, more generally, offering useful advice to college and grad students …y’know, ways to succeed without cheating.

TURNITIN: Please describe the process by which you procured customers and then completed essays. I.e., how did you find students? Did they find you?

TOMAR: I got my start while I was still a student at Rutgers, New Brunswick. That campus had everything you needed to get a cheating business off the ground: huge, anonymous lecture hall classes; a ton of bureaucratic rules that meant you had to take prerequisites far outside your personal area of interest; and a ton of fraternity bros….so many fraternity bros.

At that time, it was really just a word of mouth thing. People heard there was a guy with strong writing skills, a loose sense of academic integrity, and the kind of financial desperation that you need to get into this line of work in the first place. So word got out. I was pretty popular in the Greek system for a guy who never rushed, and I had work throughout college.

Then, one day, a classmate told me there were online companies that did this sort of thing.

This was back in 2001. I submitted a writing sample, and pretty much overnight, began working as an independent contractor. After that, customers were always plentiful. There were tons of companies out there—some far better than others—and I worked for roughly a dozen over my decade in the business.

Depending on the company, my employers would either send me custom orders directly through email, or I’d sign on to a bulletin board and select my own assignments. During the busy seasons— midterms and finals—bulletin boards were fully stocked. You could load up your calendar--a 6 pager on gun control, a 12 pager on Watergate, 3 pages on monetary policy, and five interconnected assignments on multiple personality disorder--like gathering a plate of misery at the buffet.

TURNITIN: How did you conduct research? Did you use an anonymous email?

TOMAR: I never did anything anonymous. I always used my own name and email address (and SS#—after all, this was taxable income).

As for research, Google Google Google. Everything is Googleable. I never left the house. Well, not for work anyway.

TURNITIN: Were there any topics you refused to write? For instance, what if someone wanted a paper on biochemistry? And you had no knowledge thereof?

TOMAR: My motto was “as long as there’s no math.”

There was, otherwise, no topic too complex, unusual, specific or boring that I wouldn’t at least try my hand at it. Doesn’t mean I’d always knock it out of the park. I’m sure a few of my med school papers fell short of Hippocratic standards. But I’d do my best with every topic.

Just no math.

TURNITIN: They say prices for contract cheating have gone down--would you still do it?

TOMAR: That’s really a question for my younger self.

I feel like it was the perfect job for the financially-struggling, quarter-life-crisis version of me that did it for a decade. You had to bust your hump to make a decent living at it. I’m glad to be out of it. Making less money for a job that difficult sounds terrible.

That said, I truly didn’t have any other options back then. This was the one paying job where I could use my very specific set of marketable abilities. I tried at all times to advance my career as a legitimate writer. I never stopped trying, even while I was writing papers. But the essay mill was the one place I could get paid to write back then. So I guess I’d probably have done it no matter what it paid.

TURNITIN: What made you stop ghostwriting?

TOMAR: Well, I learned a ton, and I got to write, and it did help me exorcise some of my anger toward my formal education. But, it’s not a great way to make a living. It’s a burnout kind of gig. There’s no end to the deadlines. It’s a constant hunched-over, jaw-clenched, brow-furrowed gig. It’s just not the kind of thing you can do forever.

Then there was the whole thing about actually contributing to the world in a positive way…or at least in a way that was less obviously negative. I have a two-year-old daughter now and I’m grateful that I don’t have to be ashamed when I tell her what I do for a living.

As for explaining my past life as a ghostwriter to her…well, we’ ll cross that bridge after potty-training.

Part 2 of this interview may be read here .

Want to address contract cheating at your institution? Learn more about Turnitin Originality .

19 Best Content Mills To Make Easy Money 2022

What is a content mill, how to find gigs, writing jobs, writer town -> now called listiller, writers work, onespace (formerly crowdsource), studiod (formerly demand studios), great content, the content authority, writer access, freelance careers, the dollar stretcher, constant content, freelance writing gigs, content mills alternatives, freelance job boards and listings, newsletters with daily job listings.

Lately, I have received a barrage of emails asking me for the best places to find writing work.  I have posted links and resources in different blog posts and podcast episodes in the past, but today I’ll put together a master list that you can use for your reference. It’s important to note that these sites are always changing.  If you are passive, pick one site from this list and write for them you won’t make that much money.  A writer who wants to get paid is active, seeking new clients, studying faster writing techniques and always looking for better-paying offers. Content mills have always been a good source of income for many writers, the trick is just to find one that suits your writing skill.

Content mill is a slang term for a company that usually employs tons of freelance writers in order to generate as much of cheap content as possible. By creating large amounts of text, content farms provide writers with low paying rates.

How to Get Started with Content Mills?

You need to deliver articles and content that are Tier 1.  You only have to submit an article or two with a grammar mistake, and your income will be slashed by as much as seventy percent.  There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of error.  Most clients will take your article and test it in Grammarly .  If they see any mistakes pop up, you are immediately in trouble.  Don’t let that happen to you.

The great thing about it is that most features are free. Grammarly Premium offers features that are quite useful if writing pays your bills. Find out is Grammarly worth your money .

Each of these platforms has different ways of tracking your skill level.  They rank on scales from one to three, one to five, or simply pass-fail.  If you can write in the top tier, you can make some serious money very quickly.  Whatever level you write at, running your work through Grammarly (even the free version) will bump up your rating, increasing your payouts dramatically.

How much do content mills pay?

Rates vary widely, from $0.01/word to $0.20/word. Industry standard, however, is .10 per word. Some platforms pay level-5 writers EIGHT TIMES more for the same length article.  If you want to make real money, you need to treat this like a business.

How much should you charge for a 500 word article?

The industry standard is around $50 per 500 word article. Rates go from .01 and .09 per word with Fiverr and UpWork writers charging .01 to .05 per word. Experienced English native speaking writers usually charge .10 per word.

But, before you can turbocharger your rates, you have to start somewhere, right? Learn how to write UpWork proposals to get hired.

Here are some of the best places to find writing jobs when you’re just starting out:

Best High-End Content Mills

I promote Writing Jobs for a reason.  It is a paid service, but that gate is what keeps out the riff raff.  Instead of fighting with hundreds of unskilled writers for penny jobs, get access to better opportunities.  Writers have made millions with Writing Jobs, and it’s definitely one of the first places to start.

If Writing Jobs is a little too steep, start with Writer Town.  They use a much smaller pay gate of just ONE DOLLAR.   Writer Town has changed their name to Listiller and is now FREE.  This is to separate the serious from the time-wasters and to keep spammers from infecting their listings.  They list over 7,000 of fantastic writing jobs at any given time.  They always have new listings and the community is very supportive.  Find a great network to help you find gigs and review your work.

This is an excellent environment, where you can improve your skills as a writer.

Content Mills List For Beginners 2020 Edit

This platform offers work to freshers as well to seasoned writers putting $20 to $65/h based on skill level. All work is offered fully remote and freelance and with the current situation globally, this could be your first step into change if you’re aiming at being your own boss.

Writers Work offers Part-time/Full-time and Contract positions which always comes handy if you’re after a gig and have to integrate and combine it with your schedule.

• Types of writing jobs: General content, blogs, articles, copywriting, social media posts.

BEwriters platform applies the same principle as Writers Work. Although, they pay a bit less than the mentioned competitor which leads us to the conclusion that BEwirters aims at writers beginners.

They pay from $4 to $15 per page depending on the urgency and complexity of the task. However, their average order  price varies from $18 to $47 . You can work part-time as well as full-time. You are the one who controls your occupation and income.

This is a platform you can use to get started and write extremely short articles.  They pay $.025 per word.  That comes out to $2.50 for every one hundred words you write for them.  Most of the jobs are writing short answers to questions that people post on their website.  They pay every single day, so if you need a few bucks, fast this is a good platform for getting started.

The jobs here tend to be 1-200 words in length, so you are making money at $2-5 a job.  It’s not huge, but if you can write fast and crank out ten gigs an hour you can start to earn a decent wage.  You can certainly make more than minimum wage starting on this platform.

StudioD is a good platform for beginners.  They pay more than some of the other Tier One content mill platforms, starting at $25 per article.  That’s pretty good.  Many direct jobs will pay you $25-35 per blog post or article, so their pay scale is pretty reasonable. They are kind enough to pay twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays.  You are never more than four days from your next paycheck.

They require an application to get on board.  While you’re waiting, sign up for a bunch of these other services.

Now we are moving toward the lower end of the spectrum, where many writers need to start.  They pay just over a penny per word, around $.014.  For a thousand-word article, you are going to make just $14.  But when you apply my speed writing techniques from 20K in a Day, you can crank out a lot of these articles fast.

This is a platform where you start and build your portfolio, but work to leave them as quickly as possible.

They will connect you with good potential clients, and some of them will generate a lot of work for you.  The work can become steady, which is one positive.

Great Content is a good platform to grow with.  The lowest tier pays just $.004 per word.  That’s brutal and not something you can live on in the West, but the top tier pays $.12.  That’s a phenomenal rate and one of the highest payouts in our Tier 1 best mills. Write a few articles and demonstrate that you are a native speaker and they will move you up the tiers very quickly.

The Content Authority is better for weaker writers.  If English is your second language or you are just a weak writer trying to learn your chops, then I would start here.  Their bottom tier is much better at $.007 per word.

Unfortunately, their top tier is just $.03, so you’ll make far less than top tier on other networks.

Their website isn’t the most impressive, but at least they have the courtesy to list their payouts right on the home page.  A writer can make from $.014 up to $.07 per word.  They pay better than some of these platforms, and by the time you are top tier, you will be ready to move to a better platform.

They also have good work for editors, translators, and content strategists. These jobs start around $21 at the bottom, but you can work your way up to $70 per hour which is a pretty decent wage.  Check their page to see the latest price bands.

Content Mills for Mid-Level Writers

Get onto Scripted as quickly as you can.  They charge their customers $29-$85 per blog post.  This translates into payouts of $25-60 per article.  If you are a native-English speaker, you should find Scripted a great place to start raking in the cash.  They pay high, and that’s because they only let in high-quality writers.  If you are still learning this skill, you may not get accepted on your first try.

That’s ok.  Just try again in a few months.

They also have a FABULOUS program if you want to make a living as an editor.  This program has so much work if you pass their rigorous testing process.

Unlike the competition, they pay per page instead of by the word.  Payouts range from $7-$31 per page.  They are looking for lots of academic writers as well.  If you lean toward the technical end of the spectrum, this might be a nice place to lay your hat.  They have less than a thousand writers on their rolls, so it’s not too crowded.

Unfortunately, they have about ten writers on the books for each job available.  Once you establish a reputation as a strong writer, you will be able to beat out the weaker writers with ease.

They don’t share their pay scale publicly, but The Dollar Stretcher has been known to pay $.1 per word.  This is pretty solid, and they are a strong blog with a long history and a stellar reputation.  If you get into their good graces, you can make a first-world living writing for them part-time.

This is more of an action house, where you write articles and then list them for sale.  When someone wants them, they place a bid and or just pay your asking price.  This is a more advanced platform with a lot of other options for growth.  They do a lot of connecting writers with clients as well.

A great place to list some articles once you have your portfolio sorted out. Blog posts here often sell for $60+.  The one caveat is that the site takes a hefty 35% as the middleman.  This is more than some other sites, but your take home will still be significantly higher than the Tier 1 sites mentioned above.

Sometimes the editors here can be strict, even when they are wrong. The key to success is to write and list lots of articles.  They will sell at random times, but you are setting yourself up for long term passive income surprises.

Content Mills for Seasoned Writers 2020 Edit

Well, we list it here with platforms for seasoned writers, although Freelance Writing Gigs is a writers community, so even beginners can squeeze a gig or two. It’s designed as a job board with listings updated daily.

There you can find online writing jobs to part-time on-site jobs to internships.

This is the higher level of writing with an agent.  They pay hundreds of dollars per article, but they only hire the best.  You start by building a great portfolio.  When they have work that fits your skill set, they email you with an offer.  You can make a lot of money, and as you build a reputation, you will get some very nice offers.

You can’t make a living from Contently as they don’t have work for everyone all the time.  It’s best to set up your profile and continue to work on other platforms.  You don’t have to check their site all the time as they email you anytime they have a job offer.

This is another site that pays you at least ten cents a word, worthy of putting on best mills list. You can wait for assignments to come your way, but you can also pitch blog post and story ideas.  This is more active than Contently.  With a strong portfolio and some good pitches, you can get steady high ticket work. [optin-monster slug=”i0l7ur2rs8f3gamagex6″] Join this site as soon as you feel confident in your writing ability.

You can land some good projects here.  Only put your best material in your portfolio. Articles pay $40 and up.  The more advanced your knowledge, the better the pay rate.  They do have writers that get paid in the hundreds for a single blog post.

These top level sites are all exceptional and the more that accept your work, the better.

Paying at the highest tier, ClearVoice is another site on best content mills list that only accepts highly-skilled writers.  Once your portfolio is strong, get into their program, and wait for the work to start rolling in.

MakeALivingWriting

Metro Parent

Get paid anywhere from $50 to $350 for articles with them, depending on size.  A pretty good work source with a strong reputation.  If you have a desire to work your way up into print magazines, this is a place worth starting instead of the list of best mills we mentioned.

79 Websites that pay $50 and up for blog posts

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Jonathan Green is a full-time blogger and affiliate marketing expert. Join Jonathan on ServeNoMaster.com to learn how to scale your online business. In addition to hosting the Serve No Master podcast, Jonathan is the bestselling author of multiple books including Serve No Master, Breaking Orbit, and Give to Get. He has helped thousands of people launch their first online business from a small tropical island in the South Pacific.

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10 Comments

Thanks for all of these leads, Jonathan!

The short, but informative, paragraphs on each one are really helpful.

Which tropical island do you live on?

Was working from home always your dream?

Thanks Jonathan! great content & ideas. Just an observation, as of Dec-18 OneSpace is not taking new freelancers. Not sure if this a temporary measure or they are shutting down. Cheers! M

This is the best blog I have found in my relentless searching over the past couple of days. Thank you for taking the time and effort to assist a newbie in pursuing their passion for writing.

Nice blog…thanks for showing the way to the newbies as well as to some older horses. I’m also one of them, searching for the end of the tunnel. thanks

thank you for taking the time and leaving a comment here. Searching for a suitable platform to make a bit of additional income on the side can be time-consuming. Glad I could help.

Hi Jonathan I really appreciate the time and effort you have put in for this great list of resources to get a kickstart…… i had never thought of doing this. Cheers Jennifer

Thanks Jonathan, I have downloaded 5 of your books and am working through them. Have also bought another couple of items and joined SNM FB Group. Thanks for all the good, usable info, plus scaling of the value of each. I don’t even want to speculate how many hours / days it would have taken us to collect the same info, particularly coming from behind the 8 ball. I look forward to a good, productive and long association. Cheers, Eric PS, I am in Sydney, Australia. The author webpage is not yet active – I hope it will be during the next month.

Your blog is great but 99 percent of jobs are for the US or other native speakers although a huge number of highly professional content writers are not natives.

That’s true. Most writers are non native-English speakers. But most of my readers are, so those are the sites I listed. If there are some I’m missing, let me know and I’ll add them to the article.

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Essay mills prey on vulnerable students – let's stamp them out

Universities alone can’t stop the rise of essay mills. We need support from the government and tech firms to defeat them

I n the 1990s, there was enormous optimism around how the internet would connect people and make knowledge available to all. Fast forward twenty years, and identity theft, cybercrime, online bullying and appalling sexual exploitation have become everyday news stories. Increasingly, it’s the perversions of the internet which dominate our thinking.

For universities, the digital world’s most concerning development is the spread of essay mills. They’re not new: it’s always been tempting for some students to pay someone to do their work for them. But the internet has vastly eased the relationship between customers and suppliers, fuelling the growth of these essay mills.

The business model is simple. You have an essay to write, you are time poor, you pay a fee for the essay to be written. The fee these crooks charge depends on the length, the standard you are looking for, and the deadline you are facing. I don’t use the term “crooks” here lightly. They are frequently found mis-selling their services, assuring students that the assignments they provide are “plagiarism free” (they are not) and that universities endorse their services (definitely not). We have even seen such horror stories as these companies threatening their “customers” with exposure to their university or future employer if they do not pay a further fee.

Learning is based on integrity and scholarship: showing that students have read, understood and been influenced by the work of others, and can explain how their thinking is new or different. Education is not about getting grades, it’s about being an active participant in learning opportunities. If some of that is difficult, well, difficulty is the point.

At my university we are putting in place serious consequences for students who are found to have used essay mills. But we are also working closely with our Students’ Union to understand how and why a student would find themselves in such a situation. As a result we’re developing assessments which also help students improve their time management skills. We have also blocked access to essay mill websites from the university servers, so that if students inadvertently come upon them, a message advises them to seek alternative support.

But no matter how hard we try, the advertising of these companies continues via social media, posters and leaflets appearing throughout our campus buildings, or direct messages sent to students and staff offering their services. Rooting out the manipulative and targeted advertising of these services is absolutely essential. If it’s difficult for the university to police fly-posted advertisements, it’s impossible to police social media advertising. During a routine search for an academic paper the other evening through my home internet service provider, I landed on an essay mill site.

I wholeheartedly endorse the current movement in the higher education sector to stamp out this pervasive practice. I recently joined 40 other university leaders in signing a petition urging government to make operating or advertising an essay mill illegal.

The Secretary of State for Education’s announcement that tech firms should block payments to essay mills and students should report on their peers is a step in the right direction. We need to work together to preserve the integrity of the UK higher education system from these unscrupulous companies, and the way they prey on vulnerable students who don’t fully understand the implications of their actions.

Chris Husbands is the vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University

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I met a man on a business trip and left my marriage to be with him. I have no regrets.

• Nicole Fallon-Peek met her now-husband Sean during a business trip to Boston in 2017.
• After leaving her previous marriage, Fallon-Peek and Sean began a long-distance relationship.
• Once he moved to be with her, they quit their jobs and started their own business together.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nicole Fallon-Peek, the co-CEO of Lighting Media Partners. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I met my now-husband, Sean, in 2017 while we were working for the same digital publishing company.

I worked out of the New York office as a managing editor, and Sean worked out of the Ogden, Utah, office as an assistant managing editor. I was on the same level as his boss, but we didn't work directly with or for each other.

There was an instant spark when we met

We met on a business trip to our Boston office. It was my first business trip, and I was excited to connect with new people. I had no idea that one of those people would later become my husband.

I knew of Sean because we'd been on virtual meetings before, but I'd never spoken to him. When we met in the office that morning, we both knew there was a connection. I joke that it was love at first handshake.

He was one of the nicest, most charming people I'd ever met. He was very polite, but he wasn't afraid of a little self-deprecating humor .

We went to the hotel bar every night with colleagues and flirted with each other the entire time. We're big foodies, so when we'd go out to team dinners, I'd ask him if I could try something from his plate.

I was married to someone else then, but I didn't feel guilty because it felt so natural to be talking and laughing with Sean — like we'd known each other forever despite having just met.

Our goodbye on that trip was awkward. When I came down to the hotel lobby to check out, I saw him sitting there waiting for his Uber to the airport. We met each other's eyes and smiled, but we didn't get a chance to say goodbye because he was already gone by the time I'd checked out.

We found ways to spend more time together virtually during the workday

Sean and I emailed to trade phone numbers after the trip because we felt silly asking each other in person. We tried to be professional and draw a line. If we were talking about work things, we would communicate on work platforms, but I would text Sean sometimes during work to talk about personal stuff.

We found an excuse to schedule a one-on-one call to discuss a project one of our mutual colleagues was working on. We talked about the actual business purpose of the call and then went on for another 30 minutes talking about personal stuff.

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That call was it for me. I thought, "This could definitely be something real."

Meeting Sean was the confirmation I needed to leave my marriage

Before I met Sean, I was already one foot out the door of my previous marriage , but meeting him was the catalyst to finally leave.

It took less than two weeks for me to realize I was head over heels in love with Sean. He told me he didn't want to be the sole reason I ended my marriage, but I ended it because I wasn't happy.

My ex-spouse sensed my unhappiness and wasn't surprised when I shared those feelings, but they were definitely shocked and hurt that I'd realized it because I met someone else.

I do feel bad about the emotional pain I caused them, but we both said to each other and to family and friends that we're better off for having split up. It would've happened at some point regardless of whether Sean was in the picture.

I was nervous to tell my coworkers I left my marriage for someone at the company

I was a little nervous to share that I had left my marriage and was dating someone who worked in our Utah office. Sean and I also didn't know the policy as we'd never had a reason to look — neither of us thought we'd meet our soulmate at work.

We kept talking after the business trip and decided to make things official. Two months later, we told our bosses. We didn't want people at work to find out from the company rumor mill.

I sat my boss down and said, "Hey, I just want to tell you that we've been long-distance dating. I hope that's not a problem. We don't report to each other, so we figured maybe it'll be OK."

My boss was super happy for me. She said, "I knew it! You guys are great. This is not a problem. Do your thing. It's all good." Everyone else at the office was happy that I was happy. They knew I struggled in my previous relationship.

My boss helped Sean transfer to New York

My boss helped Sean get an opportunity on another team in the New York office a few months later. I was also looking for a place to live at that time so I told him that even though it was kind of soon, our relationship was on a good track and I wanted to move in together. He agreed.

We found a place, started commuting into the office together, and spent as much time as we could to make up for not being able to see each other every day during those four months of our long-distance relationship.

We decided to start our own venture

We eventually both felt stuck in our jobs and didn't see opportunities for growth. We had similar skills and knew we could work together — and we had already talked about marriage and starting a family — so we decided to start our own business. We quit together in 2018.

Our decision to start Lighting Media Partners has paid off. We had some business friction early on — I'm a "jump first, ask questions later" person and Sean is the opposite, but we've worked through it.

We got married in November 2019 and now have a 10-month-old daughter.

If you meet your soulmate at work, go for it

If you meet your soulmate at work and are both committed to the relationship, just go for it. Jobs come and go. If you have to choose between a career and the love of your life, go for love.

That's the hopeless romantic in me, but I don't regret a single decision I made once I met Sean. My career and personal life are both better for it.

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‘Pretty Big Bunny, Huh?’: Biden Hosts White House Easter Egg Roll

Even before the skies opened up on children rolling eggs down a soggy South Lawn, the 146-year-old tradition was caught up in the latest partisan storm.

By Erica L. Green

Reporting from the White House

Bunny ears. Rain slickers. Sixty-four thousand hard-boiled eggs.

Under rainy skies, President Biden on Monday hosted the White House Easter Egg Roll, a tradition so wholesome and old-fashioned that it often simply transcends Washington politics.

“Easter reminds us of the power of hope and renewal, sacrifice and resurrection, but mainly, love and grace toward one another,” Mr. Biden said from the White House balcony, where he stood between two enormous Easter Bunnies.

But this year, even before the skies opened on the children who were gleefully rolling eggs down the White House lawn, the 146-year-old tradition was caught up in a partisan storm.

In the days leading up to the event, Republicans seized on guidelines for the annual egg decorating contest that prohibit religious symbols on the entries — even though the rule has existed for decades and was enforced by Mr. Biden’s predecessors.

Mr. Biden’s political opponents also slammed the White House for commemorating Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. The day of visibility has been held on March 31 for the past 15 years; this year, that date happened to be Easter Sunday.

Mr. Biden briefly addressed the controversy when asked about House Speaker Mike Johnson saying that it was “outrageous and abhorrent” for the White House to observe the day on Easter.

“He’s thoroughly uninformed,” Mr. Biden said.

For the most part, the Republican-stoked culture war meant little to those who turned out for the event. Before he joined the crowd on the lawn, Mr. Biden welcomed everyone and introduced the big attraction.

“Say hello to our Easter Bunnies,” he said. “Come on up, bunnies. Get up here so they can see you. Come on, get in there. Pretty big bunny, huh?”

The White House estimated that roughly 40,000 people would attend, its highest attendance ever.

Asked what she was looking forward to most at this year’s Easter Egg Roll, Kylie Hughes, a 7-year-old from Waldorf, Md., said, “I like hearing Joe Biden talk.”

The president took pictures with children and families, and even helped console a young girl who, frustrated by her form, began to cry until the president joined her in rolling her egg.

“It’s really about kids, and Easter and celebrating,” said Nikki Santos, a member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe who lives in Washington, D.C., with her 7-year-old daughter. “And you definitely feel that positive, happy energy today.”

Jill Biden, the first lady and a teacher of 30 years, made the theme of the event “EGGucation” and transformed the South Lawn and Ellipse into a school community, including hot air balloons and activity stations. She hosted families in a “reading nook,” where she read “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”

“I’m a teacher, so I love any time when we can turn the White House into a classroom,” Dr. Biden said. “And that’s what we’re doing today.”

Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent, covering President Biden and his administration. More about Erica L. Green