Satire: 7 Signs You Work for a Content Mill

Keep typing, chimp.

By Paisley Hibou

New York Zoological Society [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Extra, extra! Read all about it! Fake News is at an all-time high and Republican Baby Boomers are the most likely to share the clickbait! Maybe you, a Millennial at a keyboard, are part of the problem. In fact, you even get paid—however poorly—to churn out clickbait from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (or whenever your hoodie-wearing boss lets you clock in and clock out. Maybe 9 p.m. because your office is Slack.) After all, it's our generation that's making the Internet what it is today, with our memes and our apps and all our other whosie-whatsits that make our grandparents' eyes glaze over. If you're under 40 and have a liberal arts degree and haven't done a stint at a content mill yet, are you even living?

Then again, you might not know you work at a content mill. With #fakenews, who knows anything? There's too many hashtags and not enough sense, dammit. You deserve the real facts, not the Trump kind. Here are 7 signs you work at a content mill:

1. You tell people you work in content marketing. But you don't really know what it means. You write articles that sell things...but not directly...maybe?
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2. Your boss asks you to write 10+ posts a day. This is always justified with the phrase "They're really short!" You can't see the word counts anymore, though, because your eyes are bleeding.
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3. The most common acronym at your office is SEO. And it makes you wonder why you ever cracked open a thesaurus in school.

4. You often write sentences that convey zero meaning. No worries, they're chock full of keywords.

5. Your boss rags on you for "overthinking" everything. Other popular nags: "This isn't poetry" and "Don't send me a novel."

6. Your interview for the job lasted 2 minutes. The interviewer glanced at your writing samples, saw that you were literate, and offered you the job. No edit test required.
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7. You've written about every mundane topic imaginable. And unimaginable. How to remove falcon feathers from teddy bear fluff in the rain on a full moon? There's a post about that.
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