I began 2010 with $63.68 in my bank account, and a couple of low-paying freelance gigs. My bare-bones cost of living in San Diego for the month was roughly $900, and that didn’t include paying for food or whiskey.

Lashing out at all my University of California, San Diego writing professors (and journalists worldwide) lamenting the decline of the paid writer, I had shunned financial independence and turned to the Web. I wanted to survive on freelancing, even if it meant only eating rice and hot sauce and creating a permanent ass imprint on my couch.

Little did I know that I was well on my way to become an online sweatshop worker.

I had joined what Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU, and other critics have been calling “content farms,” such as emerging Web behemoth Demand Media, and this may be the future of the paid writer. We don’t have to like it, but content writing is being outsourced to the poor and the desperate.

Off to Work We Go

In early November, I signed up for Demand Studios, the factory of parent Demand Media, which pays between $7.50 and $20 per article and provides a ready-made list of titles. In the month of November, I made $407.50 writing articles like “African Restaurants in San Diego,” “How to Identify Inedible Plants in Oregon,” and “How to Find a Wife in Bulgaria.” In December, I wrote about drug tests, checking accounts, flight regulations and kilts. In January, I narrowed my focus to hotels and restaurants, scouring obscure Web pages, reading hundreds of reviews and wandering the streets of distant cities using Google maps.

I branched out in January as well. I signed up for Odesk and Freelancer.com, which connect freelancers to clients that pay various rates, usually about $3 for every 400-500 word article — often less. One client was asking for 100 articles on Christmas traditions worldwide and the average bid was between $200 and $300. The best paying job was for a photographic step-by-step Kama Sutra. They wanted 350-400 shots of an attractive couple and were willing to pay up to $3,000, but I didn’t know anyone willing to model.

I was accepted at Suite 101 and Life 123, where providers are paid based on readership and ad revenue, but promoting my articles at social-networking sites like digg, stumbleupon, mixx, and reddit proved to be more work than actually writing an article. I was hired at WiseGeek, a site with set rates like Demand Studios, but I still haven’t managed to tackle the heavy research needed to write such technical titles as “What is an Isometric Contraction?” and “What is Follicular Unit Transplantation?” They want around 500 words and pay $10 an article. They pride themselves on assigning writers a “personal” editor.

Pay it Forward

Notes in my weekly planner show that I made roughly $3 per hour in the month of January, and after putting myself through hell trying to make a living, while keeping the standard of my work up (I would still never use any of my Demand Content as a writing sample), I am exhausted.

It’s not exactly working in an impersonal factory, as some critics have come to characterize these online content-providers; my couch is really nice. But there were times I was searching for references, came across a Demand Media piece, and cringed at the thought that some of my work might be equally as trite, or worse, poorly written. It’s easy to lose focus when you’re plugging out 10 unrelated pieces a day for less than $100, and the titles rush by on the conveyor belt of search-driven content.

After a month of eating rice and hot sauce and hardly finding time to distract myself by youtubing Lady Gaga videos, I was almost ready to try something more lucrative than writing, like selling crack to middle school kids — or worse — working in public relations.

I made $937 in January. Some of that I spent on food, less of it on whiskey. I am starting February — the shortest month — poorer than I was at the beginning of the year.

But I’m still looking for jobs, and while I dislike working in an online writing factory, where I can’t meet or even have dialogue with my “careful” editors or fellow writers, I don’t have a lot of other options.

I mean, to be honest, I don’t even know where to buy crack in San Diego, let alone where any of the middle school kids hang out.

(For a great profile of Demand media, check out Daniel Roth’s article in Wired magazine.)