Just recently, I came across this website. It’s called Word Content, and its main purpose is to give you, for a fee, unique articles to publish on your website. When I saw it, I was surprised by the concept: if blogging is all about people expressing their personal opinion and publishing it for the whole world to read, why would you want to buy articles for your blog? So I searched for an explanation.
Why would people buy articles to put on their personal blog?
I can think only of a few reasons people would pay for articles for their own, personal website. One of them is greediness: the author wants to maximize his ad revenue, he figures writing more frequently will attract more readers, and Word Content is the solution. Writing them himself isn’t an option, since he doesn’t have the time or the inspiration. Co-authorship also isn’t an option, ’cause that would mean revenues have to be shared. $19.00 for an article of 250 words is apparently the best option. Closely related to this is another reason: laziness. It’s simply easier (for some bloggers at least) to pay a bit for an article than to do it yourself, especially if it requires a lot of research in a topic you’re not specialized in.
Blog readers value quantity over quality 
One other reason that comes to mind is not related to the blog author, but to its readers. After reading TechCrunch and other major blogs whose authors are full-time writers, readers come to expect a blog to publish at least weekly, preferably daily. They have feed readers with up to hundreds of blogs, that publish even more articles, daily. A blog that publishes one article a month is of no interest there, it won’t get any attention. If a blog writer doesn’t have any inspiration or feels sick, he will have to buy articles, in an attempt not to lose any traffic and consequently revenue. Blog readers value quantity over quality, and blog authors become a victim of this mentality, which they stirred.
Commercialized blogging: the end of blogging?
The original idea behind blogging is slowly but steadily making place for the commercial aspect. More and more blogs, with or without a large reader base, are getting bought by companies, and the whole blogging phenomenon is turning into a business. I personally equal this to a decrease in quality, as bloggers won’t be voicing their own opinion anymore, not unrestricted at least, they will always have to keep in mind the commercial aspect. If you look at TechCrunch, you can’t ignore the ads anymore. These ads at the same time provide the authors a revenue that is probably a lot higher than the average American income.1
If blog authors are, as I said above, required to publish posts very frequently to attract readers, does this mean the end of blogging is near? It is inevitable that people who might have something interesting to say won’t have the inspiration and/or the time to do this every week. Large, commercialized blogs take over, and in the end we’ll all be reading the same, major blogs again… as if they were newspapers. Blogging was supposedly about all those different individuals writing their own stories, with their own small community around them. But if large, commercial blogs surround them, they won’t be able to create a readerbase anymore.
1 A 125×125 pixels ad costs $10,000 a month, and there are six of these ads. The “About” page lists six writers. Even with the hosting costs subtracted, we can say these people have a pretty good income.
