Since November I was working with About.com as a guide for their Thailand Travel site at  http:// gothailand.about.com. The quality of guides running sites on About is astounding really. They’re able to find PhD and Master’s level writers, book authors and other experts in their field to write for their guide sites.

For about two years I was constantly checking out the available guide positions and when the Thailand Travel site started I was one of the first to show interest and apply. I was chosen for their training program which consists of showing I can master the style of writing, and the technical aspects of working with their unique content management system – which, in my opinion was atrocious! More on that later. Apparently I was competing against others in a deathmatch for the right to call the Thailand Travel site “mine”. I was offered the job and started November 1st I think it was.

The pay was $725 per month to start, which, along with 14 other things I’m doing online one can live on it here in Thailand. Anywhere else it would be a fraction of income one would need to have each month. One third? One fifth? Less? Recently the company cut the pay to $675 and lowered the rate for bonuses.

Those that become About guides are a bit taken in about how much money they can earn by being a guide. There are bonuses in place for month over month increases and then after a year that changes to the month of the new year compared to traffic from the previous year.

The requirements for volume of writing each guide must produce monthly appear reasonable in writing – but, in reality new writers are goaded into writing 22+ pieces of content each month. For myself I found that 30 hours per week (120 hours per month) was necessary to churn out the content they required. As I looked at that I realized I was making under $5 per hour.

This is not taking into account other duties like link checking, setting up weekly newsletters, keeping landing page format fresh with different content, responding to email from visitors, responding to forum posts by visitors, responding to spam posts, participation in the email chatter of the group, and more.

The content About.com wants is friendly, impersonal (to facilitate guides leaving and new guides taking over?) and fact based articles. I found writing the articles wasn’t fun. I didn’t feel creative at all. I felt like there was none of “me” in the articles I wrote.

The blog is another part of the website. The blog allows for a little of the personal voice of the guide, but they don’t really want you to be yourself because then you’re branding your name and not the About.com name. Make the blog too much like you – and you’re decreasing the value of it when you leave. Again, I didn’t enjoy writing at the blog much either.

About doesn’t pay guides to be creative in the first person voice. As a creative writer it’s stifling, and for some, unacceptable in the end as they resign.

The content management system (CMS) guides must use to enter content into the About system is a horrorshow. Picture writing up your article of 1,500 words and then trying to jam it into a template that doesn’t match what you wrote. The couple hours you just spent writing the content is not the end… now you must massage your article into one of the templates that will change the font size you wanted to use, the formatting… and after publishing your editor may contact you to tell you to put more bullet points or callouts in the article.

Adding images requires opening another module in the CMS. Filling out Title, description, keywords, owner, and some other fields about your image. Then you upload your image. Oh, photo sizes? The templates restrict the photo sizes to 150 or 200 pixels wide (or high). You may have a beautiful photo but it’s not going to look so amazing at 200 pixels wide! You can only have 3 photos per article in some templates, sometimes  – just 1.

It’s really no fun at all to publish content in this way – add to that, the system is frequently down and freezes in mid-save.

Video is just about non-existent in the travel section. About has no agreement with Youtube or any other major video content site to be able to offer travel video on their sites. For me this was one of the straws (logs) that broke the camel’s back. How can I possibly have a Thailand Travel site without videos and with photos at 200 pixels wide? How does the Hawaii site call it a Hawaii site without without video? How? What kind of travel site is that?

As you can see, I’m slowly working this up into a personal response to my four months working with About.com. Yesterday the axe dropped. It was expected, and I was bailing anyway by March 15th. I didn’t give them any “out” except – asking my travel editor to explain the big picture – and of course, there isn’t a big picture for guides that makes any sense over the long-term.

I have been thinking a lot about all the effort I’m using in order to clear < $5 per hour. I didn’t post anything at About for 11 days when I received a message from the Travel Editor, Brian. He said it had been 2-weeks since I posted anything at the website. I corrected him – as 11 days and 14 days are different. Fourteen days is what’s stated in the guidelines as a minimum for posting new content.

I crafted a long letter to Brian, to find out if he had any answers. Surely every guide working at About.com must have some of or all of the same questions in mind that I did as he or she goes about churning out 22+ pieces of content each month at less than $5 per hour. It makes sense if there is a long-term goal or payday at the end. I think you’d agree. We all work hard for some end goal, that’s part of life. Sometimes great success comes of that.

In fact, some guides work there for years producing gobs of content that will live forever on About’s servers, and then they disappear with hardly a word. Other guides receive a notice about guides that are no longer with us in our email inbox. Sometimes the circumstances don’t really make sense.

So, I crafted this letter, listing some of my concerns about the future. Thinking, maybe I’m missing some huge piece of the puzzle that hasn’t been explained to me yet. After all, I was a new guide and there was probably a lot I didn’t know yet.

Here’s the letter:

Hi Brian,

No updates to content in 2 weeks? I don’t think that could be right, but I’ll check. Ok, 11 days – wow. I do have 4 pieces of content written, but not put into the templates in the system. I recently got back my notebook that was out of commission for over 2 weeks.

Lots on my mind lately. My girlfriend and I just found out that she is
pregnant! So, that’s affecting everything I do. Mostly, it’s affecting my decision-making about what it is I’m going to continue to do as well as what I’m going to change about what I’m doing. As you might imagine this is taking some time. Tough decisions for the future need made pronto.

Truthfully I’m a bit disillusioned with the Thailand Travel gig… I don’t
see the long-term benefits very well. I don’t see the big picture at all
really.

If you can help me understand the big picture I might be on-board 100%.

The ‘requirements’ for the gig were listed in the email I received about low activity. Those are easy to maintain and everyone that takes a job as a guide must look at those and think to themselves – it’s possible to scrape those minimums at times and be OK. However, you’ve told me on occasion as did Rachel, that guides are cranking out 22+ pages of content per month. I’m assuming that MUST be with blog posts – or it wouldn’t make any kind of sense to me how someone has that much time to do so.

Can I write 10 pieces of content per month on top of 12 blog posts per month? Probably can do. But, if I don’t “get” the big picture then doing all that work doesn’t make any sense at all.

The big picture I’m talking about is…the future, the stability, the
investment of time and energy to create many pieces of content at < $5 per hour.

1. We just had a cut in pay.
2. We just had a cut in bonuses for pageviews. There were poorly chosen words regarding mass dumping of sites. My guess is – goThailand will be one to go – it’s too new to get enough back in ads to make the grade right now.
3. The About.com site format is not formatted well enough to really be
maxing out Google SERP. It’s OK, but not optimized well enough. I rarely see about.com in top Google searches that I do for keys specific to topics on about. Darleen’s Thaifood.about.com for instance has TONS of content… and she’s not on top? Something is seriously wrong there. She has a Google Pagerank of 6 and has been blogging for 3-4 years. Maybe the bounce rate is too high for Google’s liking – or ? Not sure, I don’t have access to all the
stats…
4. Photos are too small on the content.
5. The templates are not easy/fun to use – they are restrictive and
unnecessary for advanced coders. I see why they’re there – a necessary evil perhaps.
6. Guides that have been around for years are fired… What do they get in return for the years of work? A small payment each month the site keeps their content live until another guide is hired and redoes their content?
7. What happens in the case of a sale of About.com? At any time About.com could choose to stop adding huge gobs of content and get rid of the writers. Lock up the sites and enjoy a lot of income for the next couple years just based on what it has amassed. Google won’t kill SERP over the course of a year. Maybe not 2.
8. Video. If I can’t show Thailand in video – what am I doing? The photos are too small and the video is non-existent. What kind of travel site is this? Why hasn’t about.com fixed this yet? This is a serious fault for it to go on this long.

In the short term, being a guide seems to make sense… $675 a month for writing 2 pieces of significant content per month and 12-16 blog posts wouldn’t be difficult and would be a nice supplement to income.

If what we actually need to produce is 22+ pieces of content per month then it doesn’t make sense. I’d guess that would be a 120 hour effort per month. That would be paid at less than $5 per hour. I made $5 per hour as a newspaper deliverer in Pennsylvania when I was 12 and 13. Then I worked at a fruit market for $5.50. That was 30 years ago.

If there was some goal – some long-term goal and some big picture scenario that all of us guides were moving toward – it could make a LOT of sense to continue on churning out 22+ pieces of content per month, or even more.

Is there something like that?

Is there something concrete we have to look forward to?

After 5 years of creating content and I’m fired for a slow month – is there any payday?

I’m hoping you can show me something I’ve missed. Something, some substance to the big picture that I’m totally missing.

Really, I do hope! I don’t want to give up $675/month – but, if it doesn’t make sense long-term then it doesn’t really make sense in the short-term either.

Help me see the light?

:)

Vern

*******

My guess was that Brian didn’t have the answers. That was confirmed when I received back this email in which he made no effort at all to answer my valid questions about being a guide at About.com and what point there was to it in the long-term for guides that work their butts off churning out fresh content.

Brian’s letter minus the detailed extras about pay and such:

Hi Vern,

First, congratulations on the pregnancy; that’s great news and I’m very happy for both of you.

I appreciate that you’ve taken the time to lay out all of your concerns about the About.com Guide Experience. I suspected that you were harboring some doubts, and I understand where a lot of them are coming from. To be honest, though, many of your assertions are off-base and even inappropriate. Mine and Rachel’s comments about activity had a lot to do with the fact that you are in a probationary period as a New Guide and that general inactivity and a lack of enthusiasm for the position has, in general, proven to be a red flag time and time again.

I could spend a lot of time going through your list and answering your queries one by one, but I don’t feel this is going to work out for either of us in the short- or long-term. Through not necessarily any fault of your own, I think your expectations as to what this gig entails, and our expectations of Guides, are a bit off and I’m not sure we’ll be able to find a middle ground any time soon. Let’s be honest—if you’re already this disillusioned with the company after a few months, what’s going to happen in a year? Two years?

So with that in mind, it’s best for us to “shake hands” and go our separate ways.

*******

Brian writes well man! But, why isn’t he a guide too if it’s so great?

I thought the lack of response to my questions was telling and I fully expected it. I wanted to give him the chance to explain the big picture, but the truth is – all of my concerns define the big picture and for me there was no point in carrying on working for peanuts.

It’s very tempting to take on a paid job where you’re working for someone else and the requirements, whatever they are – are low, or at first appear to be low. At some point you have to add it all up and see if the big picture makes sense.

I could have worked 130 hours per month (I added 10 for the extras I listed earlier) for About and in 3 years been making $675 per month if that month didn’t surpass the previous years month. I’d have been writing lame content that is fact filled, but that gives me no personal satisfaction whatsoever. Writing there gave me no long-term benefits. Though I outright own the content, I’ve granted About.com an interminable license to display that content for as long as they choose and they can pay me the ridiculous rate of 85 cents per thousand pageviews – but, they halve the page views that I am getting on the month I’m let go. So, I’ll be getting somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 per month for all the articles I produced.

Just doesn’t make sense, does it?

In about May of 2007 I started this blog, Aim for Awesome and it’s been slow growing over that time. I’ve not focused on search engines at all, choosing to write the content for people reading it instead. Lately I’m starting to get the numbers I need to take it to the next level. So, after 22 months of effort I have something. In another 2 years I’ll really have something. Something tangible. Something meaningful. Something that was great fun to create and update with photos, articles and videos. I’ve met amazing people because of this blog.

I think I’ll put the 120 hours into this blog instead. I knew that when I wrote Brian, in fact I’ve already told someone to look out for the job opening up on the list of open about.com guide positions.

Recently Deborah Ng found out that writing for B5Media instead of for herself – was not the way to go. I had an offer to write at B5Media and decided, upon reading the contract, that it was NOT for me… much too easy to drop me as a writer. Then, what would I have to show for it? The token $?

If you want to write for About, have a good look at this article. Read it twice. To me, working extremely hard to build someone else’s site, and for a pittance, doesn’t make any sense at all. Maybe your situation is different and $675 will make all the difference in the world for the short-term.

Or maybe you tough it out for a couple of years and focus on writing a blog about some specific in-demand topic that gives you something concrete after years of your hard work and sweat. Something tangible. Something yours.

:)

Best of Life!

Vern

Twitter: AimforAwesome
YouTube: Thailand Travel Channel
My Flickr Photos

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