CrowdContent.com LOL
It was a Thursday morning. I’d already filed two stories and was trying to wind down my extremely active brain before hitting a new assignment. I had hit “refresh” on my email approximately 23 times for the sheer compulsion of it, and I finally felt done. I was ready to go to the Cloud.
Not my Apple iPhone 5S cloud, but the cloud called CrowdContent.com, a place where writers can write SEO-enhanced copy for online content.
CrowdContent.com’s logo is a bulbous blue cloud with three nameless, faceless, blob-like figurines, all in a row, next to neatly spelled-out words, all in lowercase: “crowdcontent.” There is a tiny, almost unnoticeable sharp point jutting out of the static dead cloud, as if to suggest a thought bubble.
The thoughts are coming from these figurines—who are producing content for the crowd. This is a place where the writer can be absolutely nobody, writing words that don’t mean anything, for an audience that will probably not even read them. There’s no pressure to perform, no byline to maintain, no audience to appease. There is only the nebulous crowd out there, a sea of faces that the writer-as-figurine will never actually have to encounter.
I logged into CrowdContent.com, where immediately I had to take a test to ensure that I was not a robot. I submitted a few writing samples and told the site what types of things I would like to write about, based on a list they offered to me. I selected “Astrology,” “High Finance” and “Lifestyle” because these seemed to be more up my alley, and then I was sent a form letter asking for my headshot and a pen name. I used an old professional headshot from 2008, an airbrushed version of me. I decided to make my name “Marissa Jones,” because it was boring and common.
Read the full story on Daily Dot LOL: http://www.dailydot.com/lol/writing-for-content-graveyard/
