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Will Indian Outsourcing Permeate the Blogosphere?

Will Indian Outsourcing Permeate the Blogosphere?

Tell anyone to call an 800# for technical support and they’ll likely make a crack about how you’re connecting to India. Outsourcing has become a way of life for some businesses. Heck, it’s cheaper, sometimes easier – and did I mention it’s cheaper?

Bloggers, for the most part, have never felt threatened by the outsource movement. Most overseas help, to this point, has been to conduct a service. But as Toronto’s Globe & Mail points out, it might be time for content creators to sweat.

The paper cites several media companies that are already relying on these types of offshore services, and implies that the trend could be on the rise.

Many of these firms churn out content at a ridiculously low rate of 3/4 of a cent per word. Worried about receiving text written in broken English? You can hire an overseas copywriting firm for about the same cost. Add it up and it’s still considerably less than you can expect to pay any U.S.-based writer.

See Also
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If your business is blogging, are you concerned? Would you consider hiring such a firm?

Please leave a comment below.

View Comments (9)
  • I first heard about outsourcing for content when I read this NYT article on Pasadena Now’s use of it:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30dowd.html?ref=opinion

    I run a series of local blogs and can barely keep up with creating all content, but is outsourcing what our economy needs now? I can’t imagine hiring someone in another country to report on my neighborhood!

    But I’m considering it…

    Scott Schaefer
    Publisher/Editor
    http://www.b-townblog.com

  • I live in the Czech, working for an outsourcing company from India (IT etc.) and I think it is a great deal bacause most of you lazy Westerns would not do my job for the crap money that I get. It is just cheaper and also gives us, Easterns, the opportunity to learn how the global economy works. T

  • @Filip

    It’s not lazy. It’s smart and if you were smart, you’d charge the same prices as the Westerners and make more money. So if you want to work your ass off for .03 a word, we will exploit it. Point blank.

  • Flattening the playing field for blogging was inevitable. We’ve seen newspapers hire offshore to write pieces needing only a telephone and an Internet connection. However, we cannot adapt the Wal-Mart model to selling content. Wal-Mart pricing for big screen TVs from China cannot be adapted to writing for Western audiences without problem.

    As other nations who had few natural resources to sell – be it timber, steel, fiber – the key to competition is adding value. That is why a country can buy our timber for a minimum price – then sell us products based on that resource for much more.

    The U.S. is vastly more capable of turning those cheap words sold by other nations into products (blogs, publications, etc) that will garner much higher prices.

  • I think that the reporter of Globe & Mail has mixed up blogging with newspaper/magazine writing. Blogging is not just writing a 200-word entry or writing 1,000 words daily. It is much more than that. The bloggers have to get traffic from search engines. They have to hit the front page of social bookmarking sites and get links (back links) from other blogs and websites. They have to get decent amount of Feed subscribers and they have to think of finding good advertisements (besides Adsense). The newspapers and magazines do not have to bother about most of these things.
    If any Indian blogger can do it (get good traffic and feed readers) then I am sure that he/she would not want to work for an American blogger to get poorly paid. He/she would open their own blog and enjoy the traffic and income.
    Secondly, despite the fact at least several million people are in the Blogosphere for earning money, blogging is the major source of revenue for very few people. Blog networks do not pay 50 cent or 1 dollar per word to their American bloggers. So, I don’t think that the blog networks would be able to save a lot of money by outsourcing their blog content work to India or other Asian countries.
    We have noticed that in the last 6 months, many blog networks got closed or laid off many bloggers. If outsourcing to India was a good way then they would have surely done that to save themselves.

  • This model is being used for SEO. People are outsourcing their own comments on other blogs. Sadly, these commenters don’t read the posts they are commenting on and post trash. Outsourcing is a great way to go when you’re setting quality standards. Otherwise, it can be more trouble than it’s worth.

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