They are the queries we type into Google at our lowest ebb, our souls screaming into the search bar:

"RETIRE WEALTHY" "how to get a girl to like you" "how to deal with divorce" "male sexual enhancement" "weight management Indianapolis" "instant loans"

The list goes on; it's seemingly infinite. Such search terms offer insight into both our fears ("how bad is caffeine during pregnancy") and desires ("bronies"). And thanks to thousands of poorly paid freelance writers looking to pick up some extra cash or toiling for wages, the results we’re served in these vulnerable moments are often hastily scribbled, poorly written, ungrammatical filler text. This old world relic represents a time when getting to the top of Google rankings wasn’t dependent on the quality of information you supplied but how many people linked to your site.

This kind of text—the equivalent of fast food or hangover-friendly TV—is the preserve of content mills, an Internet subculture where for-hire workers are tasked with writing vast amounts of online copy for a pittance. Today, when more media outlets and self-publishing tools exist than ever before, such word factories somehow continue to exist.

How do I know? I used to contribute. Between September 19, 2011 and February 24, 2012, I wrote 533 "articles" for an online content mill. And recently, for Ars, I took an exploratory return trip. While I wanted to see if I could still hack it at the pace required for a passing wage, my content mill comeback carried an ulterior motive. Why, in a world where everyone is keen to broadcast their opinions on many topics at various lengths for free, do we still rely on poorly written and paid filler text?

How to create the content

My six months in the Internet salt mines were spent with a prominent mill: MyAMS. Run by London Brokers, a self-professed “leading provider of online freelance writing jobs," the site claims to provide thousands of articles per month to clients on almost every topic you can think of. Much of the content produced by MyAMS goes to Unique Article Wizard (UAW), a backlink-building service used by online marketers. UAW then pushes out the articles to 20,000 or more websites online, some of which link back to customers who pay UAW to increase their search rankings.

My original assignments varied. One moment I could be tasked with 300-word short outbursts on inane topics (the first one I wrote was on "handi lift," a wheelchair elevator for home use), the next moment I had to tackle 1,000-word yarns on video poker or some other topic. The most complicated assignments were 300-, 400-, or 500-word stories on a topic that would require two other rewrites for a total workload of up to 1,500 words. Some of the most entertaining articles were the self-referential ones: stories with topics as vague as "submit artilcles" [sic] and as damning as "Why some believe that Search Engine Optimization is a scam."

All told, I wrote 386,550 words over the course of 158 days. There were barren periods where I wrote nothing—in total, 65 days during my mill tenure—but otherwise I churned out an average of 4,156 words a day. That's around one-and-a-half times the word count of this story, but on a per-word basis, writing this story pays 44 times better. With MyAMS, I essentially earned enough each day to buy an Olive Garden main course, dessert, and soft drink.

As with any other online employment opportunity, earning more is possible. The mill cajoles its writers with the aspirational story of Ellen Jackson, who made $300 a week when she wrote this 34-page guide on how to overcome writer's block. While some contributors certainly reach that level of success, I didn’t. But circumstances mercifully changed: I soon got legitimate writing work for major publications. It paid better. I realized I no longer had to spew out several thousand words for little recompense, and I stopped.

So did Rob Turner, a 32-year-old who spent five years or more writing articles for the mill. The English and Media graduate only stopped a few months back: “I found other clients and in all honesty for the amount of money you get and the amount of time it takes, it just wasn’t worth it,” he admits. As to whether someone could actually make $300 a week, he feels the same way I do. “I’m sure there are people who can probably grind it out and have nothing else to do—those annoying people who say they can get by on four hours' sleep," he says. "I’m sure they can do it and will probably have a breakdown in three years' time. Good for them if they can do it, but I value my free time.”

Other people still haven’t stopped, and more join the production line each day at MyAMS or other sites like it. One particularly slick current enterprise is TextBroker, which pays anywhere from 0.7 to five cents a word for articles. Though there aren’t specific figures for the size of the online on-demand writing market, online staffing at large is a billion-dollar industry. It's growing at a rate of more than 40 percent per year, according to analysts at Staffing Industry. These companies keep producing, churning out content and spreading it all over the Internet. The people might change, but the system seemingly hasn’t.

Clocking in

When I returned to MyAMS, my account appeared cryogenically frozen, ready to restart just as if it were February 2012 again. All it took was a quick login to reclaim my place. Behind the curtain, everything looked the same. The only difference was that there was no content to write.

It took a couple of days of pestering the site’s online support staffer, Dayniel, but stories eventually turned up. When I checked at 9am on a Saturday morning, 100 urgent (for which you’re paid a 10 percent premium upon completion) and 100 normal articles awaited me on the bulletin board. These assignments carried inspiring titles such as "labradoodle puppies texas" and "swedish singer and song writer."

Overwhelmed by the choices, I picked the first available article: a UAW 500 article on "NY traffic."

UAW articles are unique to MyAMS, ultimately requiring you to write 1,500 words as opposed to just 500. The site’s support documentation explains how it works: “First you write a normal original article. Then you make two rewrites of it. All three articles (PDF) must have the same number of paragraphs and each paragraph of each article must have about the same meaning.” This is because the end product is cut up, chopped, and changed to create even more alternative stories. In the content-producing machine, the sausage is just the start of it—that's ground up and made into meatballs, meatloaf, and a million other products.

“In effect what they were doing was try to squeeze out more articles from what you’d written,” explains Turner. “You could tell when they’d tried to do that. You’d see an article very similar to something you’d written, but the syntax was off in very odd ways and didn’t make sense. It was the equivalent of playing a Japanese [translation or knock-off] video game where you get what they’re saying, but it’s slightly off. Because it’s writer for hire, they could do that. You can’t get too precious about these things.”

When writing at volume, time is of the essence. In journalism, 1,500 words of well-crafted, in-depth reporting can take several hours at best. But in the content mills, you must churn stuff out quicker at the expense of quality. For my assignment, I was lucky that I’ve been to New York before and know something about the traffic. I didn’t have to spend any time consulting Wikipedia. I got right to it.

The first sentence was on par with Hemingway: “As one of the world’s biggest and busiest cities, NY traffic can be very busy.”

It took 10 minutes and 15 seconds to conjure up eight paragraphs on traffic (four paragraphs on traffic and four paragraphs of filler) in New York. After clicking submit, you’re taken to another screen where what you’ve just written is carved up into its constituent parts. Next, you must rewrite the same paragraph to have roughly the same meaning—only with different words.

“New York City is known worldwide as a popular tourist destination and one of the world’s meccas for business, culture and arts.”

This pass took 9 minutes 49 seconds—quicker, largely because I wasn’t required to have any original thoughts. Another click of the submit button, and the same screen pops up for the third rewrite.

“Known across the world for its stunning architecture, its individual people, and its bustling, hustling nature, New York City is an incredibly popular place for locals and tourists alike.”

After only 9 minutes and 2 seconds, the third rewrite was finished. I delivered 1,500 words to my editor. If approved, $6.60 was mine for 30 minutes of work.

$13.20 an hour isn’t a lot of money. It’s just over half the current average hourly income—$24.87—for private sector workers in the United States. The average hotel worker earns more. Those comparisons don't even paint a complete picture, as it's probably difficult (verging on impossible) to keep up that level of labor for a full day, never mind a full week.

Now, maybe a Singularity-ready human sentient will eventually sign up for MyAMS and significantly increase the average pace of writing. What took me 30 minutes might eventually take 20 minutes, so the resultant hourly pay would increase to just short of $20 an hour, in line with the typical retail worker. Whether or not writing eight hours non-stop was feasible, this projection would require someone to tap out 36,000 words a day.

Me? I was barely 3,000 words into my first day back and struggling to make sense. Faced with a screen full of complicated topics (who can write 1,500 words on "hsk 63f," a tool holder for a milling machine?), I picked next what I thought was an easy keyword phrase: "corn maze."

Initially I thought this would be fun. I thought the title was a typo—something that sadly is more common than you’d think—and I figured I could write 1,500 words on corn maize and the variety of ways it could be used as a foodstuff. But one quick Google search later, I discovered that mazes made of corn are a thing elsewhere. After moving 358 words into my description of corn mazes—and having written the phrase “the corn maze manages to combine the intellectual challenges of puzzle games with a natural element”—I froze up. It took a serious think and various meaningless sentences (“Making nature conform to planned architecture can be difficult”) to limp across the 500-word finish line. Rewriting the story twice more took yet more effort. In the end, I submitted such fine platitudes as “In the end, a corn maze is a sight to see.”

Here’s the thing: I don’t enjoy writing bad copy. I assume most writers don't. I didn’t even enjoy writing bad copy three-and-a-half years ago when I first tried out the content mills. Today as a full-time journalist, I take pride in being able to find, report out, and tell stories with enough skill for readers to spend a few moments with my work. The goal is to produce something of enough quality that it stands out and warrants attention among the billions of other words put out daily by professional writers, unpaid bloggers, tweeters, story tellers, and slashfic writers.

With content mills, your motivation is the exact opposite. The only challenge is writing legible English. Spam content doesn’t have to be grammatically correct. In fact, sometimes the keywords you’re given to write around mean you actually can’t—try putting ‘mudjacking colorado springs’ into a sentence without squeezing a few prepositions in there. These assignments don’t even necessarily stick wholly to the topic at hand. Corn mazes can include a two-paragraph diversion into classical mythology and the popularity of maize as a foodstuff in the United States, especially because the original topic can’t sustain 1,500 words. Put simply, people aren’t really meant to read what you write. Content mills make product to fill a page, creating the impression that something is there. It’s the marshmallow fluff of content.

“It was mainly SEO, especially with the keywords,” Turner explains. “I think it seemed mainly to get people’s attention, even sometimes jamming in keywords in ways that were very awkward. Because it was quite automated, you had to.”

At his peak, Turner wrote five 1,500-word stories a week, usually between jobs. “In effect, the structure of the article was fairly consistent: advise the reader to phone up this person, get references, talk to them, point one, two, three, conclusion. Very structured. This is what people expect. These were instructional things, and if I was looking up how to find someone to paint my fence, that’s what I’d want, in fairness.”