I came across a solicitation seeking an skilled writer to produce “awesome,” SEO-optimized blog posts of 650-700 words each. Count me interested. What subject? What’s the production schedule? What’s the pay?

The potential vendor was offering payment of $10 per article.

I promptly lost interest.

Let’s do the math.

A quick Google search on the average time required to research, write, edit, and revise a 1,000-word article generates a wide range of results, from AI’s reply of “about 25 minutes” to the other end at three hours and 20 minutes. The AI response doesn’t take into account the time needed to research a topic or organize the information. It also doesn’t include the time needed to review what was drafted, carefully edit that content, and revise to improve it.

So, for the sake of this argument, let’s “guesstimate” the time needed for each article to two full hours for the document length specified in the solicitation.

That’s two hours allotted for research, writing, editing, and revising. There’s no indication as to whether the writer is also expect to source images to accompany the article. But the articles must be optimized for SEO, and that requires additional time, effort, and skill.

For $10. That’s $5 per hour. That’s not just paltry, it’s insulting.

Let me be perfectly frank: The odds anyone will receive “awesome” content written by anyone who works for $5 per hour are very, very low. Those are the rates one might expect to pay a freelance writer from a Third World country, a writer whose command of English is better than my command of that person’s language but nowhere nearly strong enough to meet professional standards. In other words, that client will get what he or she pays for: garbage content poorly written or generated by AI.

If you want excellence, you have to pay for it or do it yourself.

The moral of the story: Don’t insult the professionals you’re trying to hire.