The guys over at Business Insider have posted an article speculating on the current status of AOL’s Seed freelance writing platform. The article notes a “commenter” on another article has said that there are no articles to claim and that he thinks that Seed is defunct, to use BI’s words. There is even a note in the article about how the writer has reached out to the AOL spokesperson to get some comment.
Of course, they could save themselves some work and innuendo by just checking the home page of Seed.com, which states under “Current Assignments” that:
We are in the process of reformatting Seed.com and new assignments are currently on hold.
In other words, there are officially no assignments being given out via the Seed writing system. No need to check with anyone or take anyone’s word for it. It’s right there in black and white.
In all fairness, Seed has been empty of new freelance writing assignments for a long time, and I’m not entirely sure when that message showed up. Frankly, I never wrote much of anything for Seed because they didn’t pay decent freelance writing rates and the topics were seldom interesting or, frankly, worthy of being written.
Thus, another content mill whose business strategy was to pay virtually nothing to low-skilled, inexperienced, part-time freelancers has gone belly up. According to the note on the Seed.com homepage, there will supposedly be a Seed 2.0. Unless it generates better quality writing for better purposes, there is no doubt that Google’s Panda algorithm updates will crush the next version as well.
Happy writing.