Is Constant Content Still Worth Writing For? (2020 Update)

For many years now, Constant Content has been a worthwhile platform for writers due to the ability to write about pretty much whatever you want and offer it "on spec" for pretty much whatever price you want. I won't reinvent the wheel here, you can read my earlier review of it for all the details if you care to.

There have been some disturbing developments in the past year, however. It started with reports of the editing going way downhill in early-mid 2019; things being sent back to writers with nonsensical or dismissive requests, or sometimes being rejected for no good reason whatsoever. Editing requests also started appearing in people's mailboxes at 2 or 3 AM US / Canada time, which happens to be work hours halfway around the world in India.

Then toward the beginning of 2020 there was apparently a massive ban wave, with some writers receiving callous and sometimes outright threatening messages from editors prior to having their accounts suddenly suspended. There was even some word that people were being banned over saved drafts that had not yet been submitted to the editors!

Crummy editing (or some sort of rogue troll) is a serious annoyance, but ultimately it's just a more extreme version of the peaks and valleys of editing quality that have always been with the site. Missing scheduled payments is another thing entirely, and a first for the site.

In May of this year, writers started to report not getting their bi-weekly or monthly payments (this has since happened to Yours Truly as well). The cause turned out to be that Constant Content's parent company, RevenueWire, had been dabbling in Indian call center scams and had its payment processing system (SafeCart) taken down by government authorities. Oops!

The scam case appears to have had nothing to do with Constant Content, which is still operational but currently hobbled by the inability to accept credit card payments from those purchasing content or issue PayPal payments to its writers. RevenueWire has multiple independent companies under its umbrella and the scams were perpetrated by other subsidiaries. Still, this is a major blow to the company. It is apparently working on getting a new payment processing system in place, but word through the grapevine is this may not happen for another month or so.

So is Constant Content still worth writing for? Right at the moment, I would say no.  I don't suggest abandoning it entirely, but I would at least wait until they have a credit card and PayPal payment system back in place to indicate stability. For writers who have catalog pieces on file with them, I would also strongly suggest indexing anything that's unsold and making sure you have backup copies of it. Companies that go out of business due to fines and property seizures tend to do so very fast and with little to no warning, as we just saw recently with Today's Growth Consultant.

Writers can currently request payments by emailing Constant Content's support staff with a bank routing and account number, but this is not recommended. One, unencrypted email of financial information is NEVER a good idea. And two, you're sending it to a subsidiary of a company that just got busted for tech support scams. If you have a substantial amount of money hemmed up with them and really need it now, I would suggest making an account with one of the free prepaid card companies or online-only banks (like Chime, NetSpend or Bluebird) that you don't intend to ever use again. These generally give you an online account with a routing number that you can use to receive and extract your money and then close the account down.