The Content Authority

The Content Authority Review:

The Content Authority finds writers willing to produce blog posts and other literature for businesses seeking freelance writers. However, the site manages to be even more worker-unfriendly than most content mills, which are essentially sweat-shops for writers.

It pays less per word and imposes a variety of restrictions on writers that would make it impossible to use the site as a forum to build a following of your own.

How it works

You sign up here and they’ll match you with jobs. The bulk of the jobs are writing SEO content for blogs, which will require using a particular key word multiple times in your copy. Even if the client has misspelled its keyword, The Content Authority says you must include the misspelled keyword as required.

For this, the site is likely to pay you between one and 6 cents per word. And you may be called on to revise your copy

Getting paid

The site pays writers by PayPal once a week, if you have at least $25 in your account.

Recommendations

There is only a remote chance that anyone could write quickly enough to make this a minimum wage job. Honestly, a better option for those who want to write for a living would be to get a good dog-sitting job with, say, Rover (which will pay $25 to $50 to have an animal sleep at your house over night) and write in your free time on spec.

If you are a skilled writer, you can find real writing jobs at Skyword, Cracked or Contently.

What their writers say (from Indeed):

I am so grateful for the support The Content Authority gave me when I started out 11 years ago. That beginning led me to a successful business with a considerable client load. However, in those 11 years, the rates haven’t been adjusted at all. So I very rarely find myself writing for TCA. Even on the low end, TCA is still below the majority of the content platforms out there.

SEO content mills are the bottom of the barrel in terms of writing. And make no mistake: The Content Authority is a SEO content mill. The difference between SEO and professional writing jobs astounds. Academic writing, magazine features, blogs for companies, scripts, and brochures all prove much more lucrative and easier to deal with during the editing process. SEO content mills have the hardest editors because they must justify their awful pay scale (well below minimum pay.) They say if you write quickly, you can make up to $15.00 an hour. However, if you make a typo trying to beat the clock, they knock you down to a lower tier to keep you at a lower pay rate. Or, they bemoan issues like Oxford commas, knocking you down from a 4 to a 3.

Cheap

Content Authority sucks. Anyone who pays $5.00 for 600 words is a cheap jerk. I’ve earned about $600 for a 1000 word magazine article many times…SEO content mill writing is like working in a sweatshop. They expect perfection yet pay peasant rates.”

“Great job that recognizes my creativity and skills, but very low on pay. I have been with them since 2012 and when I get a full time job elsewhere I usually put my employment with The Content Authority on pause with no issues.”

Updated 2/2/2023