Churnalism, Content Mills, and Copy-Paste: The Life of a Professional Plagiarist

Hi, my name is @beowulfoflegend, and I'm a freelance copywriter. In other words, a professional plagiarist.

I can hear the torches being lit and the pitchforks being sharpened already. Well, hakuna your tatas before you end up on blood pressure medication; I'm about to spin you a tale about how the internet has turned every aspiring writer and journalist into a black-hatted plagiarist. Yes, every single one of us.

Plagiarism is bad - except when it's not

The best part about this image is how there's no attribution for it. Irony!

Plagiarism is a serious offense here on Steemit, and rightly so - this isn't Facebook. You can't expect to get rewarded by mindlessly sharing memes, image macros, or website "articles" claiming that you can cure cancer with weed and lemon juice. The platform is about original content; despite this, there are countless posts every day that are being passed off as original work by any number of mouth-breathers on Steemit, even though they will invariably get caught thanks to the efforts of community policing efforts like @steemcleaners and bots like @cheetah.

Yet there will always be idiots thinking they're going to make bank by copy-pasting content onto Steemit, as it requires little to no effort on their part. Not only that, but the vast majority of people have been conditioned to think that plagiarism is not a big deal because they see it every day, whenever they sit down at their laptop or pull out their smartphone: the internet has legitimized plagiarism.

Traffic jams on the Infotainment Superhighway

Image from Avenue Q via Giphy

Before Al Gore invented the series of tubes we use today to look up pictures of Grumpy Cat and HD midget amputee porn, you could make a living as a copywriter in a relatively respectable fashion. Sure, you couldn't really do it from home - you had to be in close proximity to a major metropolitan area that had enough mainstream print news organizations - but you could still be taken seriously as a writer. Even if you worked for an ad agency writing marketing copy for the kinds of mail-order magazines that end up in half of the nation's bathrooms, it was at least honest work.

Today that's all different. Print media is, let's face it, all but dead. The internet has taken over, and now any schmuck with a Wal-Mart laptop that lives close enough to a Dunkin' Donuts to pirate their free wi-fi can vomit content up on the internet for money. Not a lot of money, mind you, but enough to keep you rolling in Virginia Slims and Mad Dog 20/20 for a while, anyway.

The beginning

Gandalf knows what's up.

I didn't start out as a plagiarist. In fact, with my academic background, I was absolutely vigilant when it came to citing sources for anything and everything. Unfortunately the first casualty of my career as a freelance copywriter was my journalistic integrity.

When I first started out in 2010, search engine optimization was all the rage. There were some serious black-hatters out there that cared about nothing but getting their garbage throwaway website addresses to the top of the search engine rankings so they could then sell the domain name to someone else for ridiculous sums of cash, and it was my job to post content stuffed with SEO keywords to support those goals. Best way to do that back then was to take a news article on whatever topic could be broadly connected to the website you're trying to promote, rewrite it so that it would pass an automated copy-paste test, and pepper it with enough keywords to attract web crawlers.

This was mind-numbing work, but it was the only work that would actually pay you reliably. Sure you could start up your own blog and pray that you'd get enough traffic that whatever shifty affiliate marketing scheme you had running in the background would pay out - if you were lucky. Getting original content published in established websites was also out of the question, as most sites didn't - and still don't - pay contributors much of anything besides "exposure." Have you ever tried to buy diapers and baby formula with exposure?

So this became my life: I would spend hours every day combing through RSS feeds from legitimate news sources, copying original articles, pasting them into my workspace, and then rewriting them sentence-by-sentence. In other words, I made money off of other people's work. Sure it wasn't copy-paste plagiarism, but it's decidedly black-hat. The money wasn't even that good, either - If I was lucky, I was paid a dollar every hundred words, so the only way to make decent money was through volume.

Self-loathing is a hell of a drug

Thank you, SpongeBob.

So why the hell would I do this to myself? Why not go flip burgers down at McDonald's or something? Circumstances at the time made it impossible. I was unemployed, recovering from a nervous breakdown after working as a call center rep for a major cable company, terrified of social interaction of any kind over the phone or face-to-face, had just moved from New York to Pennsylvania into a tiny third-floor attic apartment only to have my car die. The only thing I could do besides hanging myself in the bathroom was get on the internet and whore myself out for money.

Thanks to a toxic combination of self-loathing and falling in with predatory clients that operated on the "churn and burn" philosophy when it came to their freelancers, it got to the point where eventually I was working for a content mill writing articles in order to pay the bills. Writing 6,000 words a day for maybe $400 or so a week might sound great until you realize your work assignments usually consist of eight-to-ten hours a day writing essentially the same 500-word article 12 different ways, and always on something mind-numbing like record player needles or industrial water filtration systems. It got so bad that my wife would find me passed out across the keyboard at 2 in the morning on the regular.

All of this content I was writing was absolute horseshit. Revamped, regurgitated, reconstructed garbage, taken from a myriad of different sources and stitched together like an SEO-keyword Frankenstein's Monster. I was on the verge of burnout - I told my client as much and he shit-canned me faster than you could say "food stamps."

Getting out, but not before it was too late

image from the Know Your Meme repository

It was at this point where I said "fuck this, I've had enough." From then on, I refused to take on any more work that would have me churning out SEO-bullshit articles for pennies on the dollar. I started only taking jobs that were for legitimate outfits, or for projects that required editorial work.

The upside of this is that now I can say that I'm proud of what I'm doing. Unfortunately, honest work pays a lot less. This means it's been more of a struggle to make ends meet than it was while I was a slave of the copy-paste content mill.

By extension, it's also why there's so much crap that needs to be waded through here on Steemit. People have been trained to accept this kind of churnalism, for lack of a better term, when it comes to reading content online. It's expected because it's the only thing many people have ever experienced, and it's only when it's truly egregious - like the clickbait title bubble - that there's any kind of outcry anymore. Is it any wonder that when someone comes here for the first time - from a sea of regurgitated plagiarist content from the Facebooks and Buzzfeeds of the world - that they try their own hand at it? It's the only thing they know. It's become a cultural meme, and I don't mean in the image macro kind of way, either.

I am part of the problem

image from T-Shirt Hell

With the amount of garbage content I've created over the years for a revolving door of under-paying clients, I realize that I've been part of the problem - that this Hell is of my own making, regardless of the circumstances I might have been in that necessitated my actions.

It's part of why I've been so supportive of Steemit. Supporting this platform and doing my part to keep it free from plagiarized content is part of my penance for plagiarizing my way through paying my rent and utility bills for so long - my atonement. I can only hope that the contributions I've made to this platform have been enough to at least begin to offset the hurt I've done in the past... and that it's not too late to seek redemption, or to beg forgiveness.