Freelancing the Internet

The internet provides us with a seemingly limitless amount of information (obvious fact number one), all of which has to be written by someone somewhere. One would think this would create a boundless amount of work for all those writers out there. However, most of the content written online is done for free and often folks are reading more for the content or "facts" presented than the presentation itself. Without editors and page frames to help shape and restrain, writing can become aimless and wandering, and often, just plain bad. The payoff is shaky as well if you're looking for monetary gain--"monetizing" your site is only helpful if you get thousands of views per day and more so if people actually click on the advertisements. I don't know about you, but I don't think I've ever purposefully clicked on an ad blurb. In fact, I've even browsed away from sites where the ads were too intrusive to the writing.

However, for those writers of a journalist/essayist kind, there are some alternatives to going it alone: information sites Suite101 and About.com are currently looking for people to fill their freelancing gigs. As far as the writing side of this goes, you would have access to an editor and get to network with other writers. As for revenue, I'm undecided whether one would be better off starting their own website or submitting to the regulations (especially the copyright regulations) of these sites. Nicholas of writtenroad.com has a pretty helpful evaluation here of the two sites with some pros and cons for you (writtenroad is also a good resource for travel writers).