Why publishers should pay for content even if they can get it for free

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For a Washington Post article on why it’s difficult for journalists to organize into unions, Lydia DePillis interviewed media consultant Alan Mutter about journalists’ lack of leverage when negotiating pay. “With an abundance of content, and content producers, many of whom are totally happy to give their stuff for free for the ephemeral compensation known as exposure, the whole marketplace has been upended,”  Mutter said.

Writers who are willing to write for free have been a consistent scourge of the freelance writing community going back more than a decade. It used to be that the ire was directed at the publishers who “took advantage” of these poor writers, building multi-million dollar media companies on the backs of their free labor, but ever since a $100 million lawsuit filed against the Huffington Post on behalf of unpaid bloggers was laughed out of court, it’s pretty much become widely accepted that companies can serve as “platforms” on which others can publish without direct financial remuneration. Now, almost all of the anger is directed at the laborers themselves, who, if you’re to believe arguments from some professional writers, are not only devaluing their own work but also the work of others who are trying to make a living at it. In 2013, the author Jill Corcoran accused writers who heavily discount their ebooks (in many cases offering them for free) of depressing the entire book market and retraining the consumer to think that books are worthless. “Unless you are selling a heck of a lot of books, at $3.99 or  $0.99 or at the golden ‘price’ of FREE, we have all just devalued ourselves to a point of below the already pitiful American minimum wage,” she wrote.

While I’m perfectly fine with writers who choose to work for free and publishers who don’t pay all their writers (sometimes a writer actually does benefit from the much-derided “exposure,” especially if he’s not trying to make a full-time living writing), anytime I’ve recruited writers for a client or a publisher I’ve always paid them, even if I might have been able to find people willing to do the same work for free. Why? Well, as anyone who has ever had to organize volunteers or any kind of free labor knows, you often get what you pay for.

Here are six reasons you should pay for content even if you can find people to write for free.

1. You can ask for edits without guilt

Sometimes a writer turns in a blog post or article and the copy is pitch perfect and only in need of some light copyediting. But more often you receive a manuscript in need of revisions, sometimes requiring the writer to go back and restructure the piece. But if the author just wrote for free, are you really going to be that jerk that makes him go back and perform more free labor just so it meets your standards? But the second you attach payment to it then you’re more than justified in demanding a professional, finished product, and the writer will be incentivized to cooperate fully if he or she wants future work assignments from you.

2. Paid-for content is much, much higher in quality

Yes,  there’s always that one example of that amazing essay published at Huffington Post that HuffPo didn’t have to pay for, but let’s face it: most free content sucks. If they’re writing for you for free, chances are they’re doing it because they couldn’t get paid for their work. How much are you willing to devalue your brand just so you don’t have to shell out some money for content? And what does your willingness to devalue your brand say about how invested you are in your brand in the first place?

3. You can set deadlines

If you’re publishing on an anything-goes schedule, then perhaps publishing content you don’t pay for is fine, but if you’re commissioning a piece for publication on a certain date — perhaps you’re publishing a themed issue or want to stick to a regular posting schedule — then prepare to be disappointed.  That writer, no matter how good-intentioned, will always push that assignment to the backburner the second something even slightly important comes up, and the day it’s due you’re likely to get an apologetic email explaining that things got too busy. When there’s pay attached, however, then suddenly writing that content in time for a deadline becomes a priority.

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4. You get exclusivity

If someone writes for you for free, chances are he’s doing it for “exposure,” which means he’s cross posting it to every single website that will take it. Prepare for his article to be uploaded to Huffington Post, Medium, LinkedIn, and his personal website. If you’re looking for any SEO value from that content, chances are Google will be prioritizing these other more-established sites over yours. Paying for content means you get it exclusively and it’s not competing with itself in other places.

5. Paying for content isn’t all that expensive for the value you get out of it

No  you don’t have to pay the $1 a word that a glossy magazine like GQ pays its writers. You can get  high quality content by paying just $100 or $200 per piece, so if you’re a brand that’s publishing two or three articles a week as a form of content marketing, you’re really only paying about $1,500 a month. Can’t afford a mere $1,500 a month for marketing? Then maybe it’s time to reassess your priorities and seek outside investment, because without marketing you won’t be able to reach potential customers.

6. You can hold on to good writers

Let’s say you find a good writer who is willing to write for exposure. That means he’s looking to jump ship to a paying gig at a moment’s notice, and he has no incentive to stay with you. So you just spent all that time and energy building the brand of a writer who goes somewhere else the moment he truly becomes valuable. That puts you back at square one in trying to recruit and train other writers.

Of course, the latest media fad has been to launch a “platisher,” a company that solicits and pays for professional work in order to attract writers who are willing to write for free (Huffington Post could be considered one of the first platishers). But in order to make this work you still have to pay for content (and be willing to take the blame whenever one of your free writers publishes something controversial), and you need to have a system in place (usually an editor or built-in voting tool) in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you have a developer staff and the resources to carry out such a large-scale operation, more power to you, but the rest of us who are looking to run content operations need to settle on one of two options: pay for high quality or scrape the bottom of the barrel for whatever you can get for free. Which one you choose depends on how much you value your brand, or rather how much you’re willing to sacrifice it so you can save a few dollars.

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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on TwitterFacebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.