Ok, panicking now.... research orders from students down?

Compared to the past 2 years, the number of my orders is significantly down, I'd say between 30-40%. It is true for a couple of essay mills I write for and also for my private clients. Is it just me? Has anyone else noticed the same trend? We are entering the high season, yet it feels like a bad summer month again.

It feels it's not just you. The overall trend has been downwards for a couple of years, unless I'm wrong? Still, it's just the start of October and it should pick up in a couple of weeks or so. Have you been doing anything differently in the last years (advertising, etc.)?

I think it's still early and it's easy to have bias that even early October is as good as late. But with how easy it is to make a website, even one with backend functionality, the competition has gotten more diverse.

Any decline in orders can't be attributed to a corresponding decline in student numbers. Enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the U.S. increased from 16.9 million to 20.4 million between 2003 and 2013; the number of full-time students increased 22% and the number of part-time students increased 18% (National Center for Education Statistics @ nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98).

Besides increased competition, another far less likely but still possible cause could be that high schools are doing a better job of teaching young learners how to research and write papers (nah).

I saw a 20-30% drop few years back, it lasted for one season IIRC. Since then my order rates have been steady, with a decent growth trend. Maybe you're doing something wrong or you just started out? In any case, the market appears fine to me.

That would be a tough row to hoe today. I remember a time when millions of students ... oh yeah, I told you that story already. Well, get Grandpa another glass of bourbon anyway.

Yeah, it seems the entry ceiling for individual writers is rising steadily, dunno about companies.

I know a student who used to order papers from a freelance writer and then got hired by the same freelance writer to help him out if needed. It could be that some smart students 'help' less smart students for money (and they charge significantly less than professional freelance writers)?

No, everything is the same. Another trend I've noticed is that students tend to procrastinate more than usual, and crazy, last minute orders are more common now. Personally, I think it is a combination of some sort of economic slowdown (less money) and a market saturation as everyone and their mother call themselves an academic writer now. Have you seen those fiverr gigs, 4 bucks a page?

I have long intended to write a paper about this issue but I keep putting it off ...

It's the Snowflakes Generation. They live in their parents' basements, have free food, free entertainment. They don't need anything but selfies and some Facebook drama. They don't start up families, they don't invest in anything worthwhile, they hope their parents die and they can continue. :-)

You're using a very broad brush there.

My friends in the business have been saying the same thing as well. They have been experiencing a lowering of their clients and a cooling off during the "hot" seasons as well. This is on a year to year comparison for them. It has forced them to seek other writing opportunities while still keeping the academic writing side of their income active. Simply relying on the students this semester isn't enough to keep the bills paid and paid on time. The consistently low season has also forced a slow down in the payment of their salaries and the business has become more cut throat than ever with a large pool of writers fighting it out for a limited number of clients. They are attributing this to the way that studying has become more modular in content and the essay assignments are often given out at the start of the semester, allowing the students ample time to do their own research and writing prior to the deadline. It isn't that the market has dried up, it's just that the students are starting to value academic integrity as they take the academic oaths that they sign more seriously these days as universities are starting make more and more examples out of students caught using academic writing services or independent writers.

That's complete bollocks. From what I see, the quantity of orders has been going up over the last 3 years, especially for private writers. Companies had a slump but most of them are getting back as well.

I'd be skeptic about 'private writers' numbers. The reality is that the market has been flooded with low-educated scammers aka. 'writers' who have no choice but to compete with very low prices (and flashy websites in most cases). Especially the first-time customers think they get a great deal until they find out the paper was mediocre or software-paraphrased at best.

Well, I don't know about your company, but from my experience and that of other freelancers, the order numbers are growing steadily . It's not just me, almost every company I write for (from time to time) has seen a good growth over the last two years.

That does not mean you're wrong, however.

About half of those victims probably give up on the industry, but the other half jump right back into the client pool, although maybe after a little more research to find a legit provider than they put into it the first time. I regularly have new clients show me the atrocious essays that they received from the first provider they tried for the same assignment. Not all that infrequently, someone declines to use me for a project after asking for the price, and then ends up paying me more than the original price to do it in a rush a few weeks later after they tried a much cheaper provider first and received something totally unusable.

If you go to a social media and post publicly you're going to pay for an essay written and your offer is $20 for 10 pages, numerous scammers with fake "Harvard / Yale" profiles will contact you, ready to deliver. So if it counts as an "order," you may be right about the 'steady growth,' but if we talk about real orders (completed by real / US-UK-EU-educated writers), it may not be the same story because more and more students may think that anything more than $20 per page is not a good deal. Most of them will eventually learn the hard way that quality doesn't come cheap, but in the meantime they may keep trying the fraudsters who can only lower the price to get their attention.

I think with students' populations growing by the year in the relevant countries, it is probably difficult to assume that the demand for academic writing is declining. My personal experience is positive even though I do not belong to the native writers' league. I would agree with the premise here that the number of scamming companies and writers is also on the rise, unfortunately. One thing I have sure observed is the new phenomenon that a specific institution is preferred by a specific student population from such-and-such country. They've established a network where senior students guide the juniors about the A-to-Z of the academic writing industry. Second, (at least for us the writers) personal communication is becoming a norm because the students want to communicate quickly. I don't know what the feedback from a legit company may be about the number of their clients; I am led into believing that it is no more exclusively the Google gateway that the students are using. There are probably many more niches, the expanding peripheral circles, today than ever before.

I've been wondering how good/excellent legitimate freelance writers are going to compete with the fraudsters; I've seen a flashy website operated from Ukraine (for public, on "About Us" the location was, you guessed it, USA / New York) featuring a 'freelance writer' who offers his services for $5-$10 per page (depending on deadline). Obviously, it's a scam, but I believe the fraudster may often produce something 'good enough' for an average customer who may not instantly notice the paper has been auto-paraphrased or plagiarized / recently submitted to TurnItIn. And the fact that the student's personal identity will be hacked in the future is another story and many students, frankly, don't care.

Then same student who visits, let's say, FW's profile, may wonder if paying 3-5 times more per page is his/her best financial option. How would you respond to that?

It's simple, really. There's a market for low end customers - who just want something written once and will never order again - and that's what the Ukrainians do best. And there's the bulk of other students, who are in need of support for a longer period. If they get burned once, they'll think twice who they're giving their money to, and then the truly legitimate writers/companies come into play. And finally, you have your cautious kind, those who look before they buy, and they tend to find us more often than not.

@Major
I think there's probably an increase in the number of classes as well. Also, an increase in the number of students in university means that a bigger majority of those students are international students. Honestly, these ones often need help with simple English papers. It doesn't matter what company they hire because the papers are too easy to fail.

Again, some universities are increasingly offering online classes. In my experience, assignments (especially discussion forums) for these classes are often not as strict with grammar, and language mechanics, they only want the question answered.

These two examples of students could probably hire cheap companies and private writers and review them positively.
Unfortunately, students who require papers at higher levels may be fooled by the positive reviews.

Seriously? I've read some of the "simple" papers written by halfwits with 0 ability to write in English. They most certainly cannot produce anything that would even remotely pass in college. Maybe in high school, just maybe.

If anything, online classes need more writing, not less, and of better quality.

Online classes need more writing but the discussion forums are not as strict for online classes when compared to other writing assignments. This is my experience though. You'll have about 1 strict assignment every month and 4 not so strict ones in the same month. The four are hard to fail because all that is needed is to respond to the prompt and then respond to another student (s).


Well then, I don't know how you would explain how they continuously have work and returning clients

Aside from the few Ukranian sites that I know of (not official data, just observation over the years), there really aren't that many sites which actually get repeat orders. From what I see, almost on a daily basis, 90% of students who order from such sites and don't give up simply find reputable services and deal exclusively with them.

Over the years I've done more than 100 of those online class forum responses requiring short responses to classmates' arguments, especially for Nursing programs. When I read some of the posts from the other students, I'm amazed at how bad they usually are. Luckily, when they become nurses, their job performance and the quality of care they deliver won't depend on their writing ability. I question the usefulness of these writing assignments because they don't seem to have anything to do with training nurses to be nurses.

At least, my niche is repeat clients and referrals. I strongly believe that, yes, the fancy-badge-endorsement sites (not just from Ukraine but from India, Pakistan and other countries) do make it problematic for an average client to get to a legit writer/company. There is so much to reap that these guys have put in place teams of competent professionals doing their SEOs, CRM, auto-paraphrase, etc. Simply, they have the skills and investment that's damaging the share of legit guys, mostly in US/UK.


I am just thinking if you have had some data/personal research/observation to back this claim because I wonder if there is just this one-time-wonder client.


I think as there is a lot of dough in this industry, there is this intuitively brainy professionals these companies have hired. Probably, we don't know their skill level.

The proof is these sites are thriving by the hour.

I think they may have a number of decent enough writers who are able to keep them running. It's only that in most of the cases, the bad experiences from students get more publicity. Consider this- the main reason most people like 'Wordsies' know the writers were bad is that they have had to revise poorly done work. If the work was good, then it would not have had to be revised. Consequently, we would not know how good it was. Again, students mainly come here to post their negative experiences. They will hardly post the good ones because that is what they expected and that it how it should be. Also, it's against the forum rules. On other sites and places, students will only talk about their good experiences if they were exceptional. My thinking is that these 'scam' companies sometimes produce good enough papers that keep them going, only no one congratulates them for delivering what was expected of them.

Makes a lot of sense to. In my country, fresh graduates (from good colleges and Cambridge system) hunting jobs are their most valuable asset. They stay around with them for a while and move on while a few stick with them or themselves jump into these waters. Quality, besides native like written language, is not a big issue these days (and I wonder if an ESL/EFL client cares about it), at least in my country which is now snatching IT jobs from neighboring countries. Tough times for us, lolz! :-)

That's a valid point. And when you consider that the Ukrainians run, roughly, 600+ different websites (owned by up to a few "entrepreneurs"), the actual returning client ratio is no more than 20%. It's like out of 10 students something on Amazon, 8 would never order from them again. Obviously, their sites lie about the ratio, but that's nothing unexpected.


Indeed. 90%+ of 'positive reviews' are totally made up by those services; 100% of positive video reviews are also totally fabricated.

The thing is, not all of the students will bother to check the history of the academic site that they will be ordering from so they may just be going round robin within the network of the same company without knowing it. So they unwittingly keep going back to the same sites, the same writers, and the same problems. Will any of them wise up and stop going back to the companies? Yes, but still, they will not know whether or not they are with an affiliate company or not because the sites are careful to cover their tracks when it comes to their connection to various other writing sites. I will grant that the reviews are all made up. Again, it goes back to the discussion about whether or not the students bother to verify the sources of the positive reviews. Paid hacks can keep going to sites like this where they can sing the praises of the company to the high heavens. If they manage to con even one student into using their service or the service of one of their affiliates, then they will have succeeded in their desire to keep the students running around in circles within their control. As for the quality of the work, these students are paying for "model papers" that should help them pass the class. So believe me, they are still prioritizing quality over simply turning over work to complete the requirements. When the paper is bad, they fail and the money is wasted. So it is still all about the quality, even for ESL and EFL students.

This is true, even with respect to the legit American-based companies that own dozens of different websites and take orders from all of their "affiliated" sites. As a company writer, I saw comments in some clients' orders that said things along the lines of "I hope you guys can do a much better job than %$*& company, because the essay they sent me was horrible, so that's why I'm trying you guys this time." Meanwhile, the other company they mentioned was just another of those owned and operated by the same parent company and their newly-placed order was the same one that had been posted on our assignment board a week or two earlier for the exact same stable of writers as their new order.

Yes, I was referring to the same, quality; it is what matters to every client no matter what their personal skill level is.

I have seen a slowing in my academic writer orders but an increase in my company centered copy writing clients. I would not say though that the academic orders have slumped to a worrisome level. On the contrary, the order flow has been steady for me over the years that tend to believe that the academic writing field has stabilized. There are enough companies, both legal and questionable, to go around the existing number of clients. The clients who end up with the scams eventually find their way to my company, where they bump up my student client roster. However, I have found that the academic orders do not come in quite as fast as my corporate clients. Majority of my business has come from them these days as they continue to build their social media profiles and websites, which require the expertise of experienced copywriters, a service that I am happy and highly qualified to provide either on a personal basis or through the assignment of one of my competent company writers. The name of the game now is diversity. Diversify from academic writing for an increased client portfolio that is sure to boost your client numbers and income.

Bringing back this discussion, I've found that the writing assignments that I've received as of the past year were primarily 50-50 when it came to academic writing and other forms of copy writing. Surely, even though it's possibly for me to tip the scales and focus more on copy writing, I always somehow end up coming back to fulfilling academic writing because of past clients and companies that I've established relationships with. I do agree, however, that (like any other freelance career) it is important for the writer to know for sure how to diversify their portfolio since it's the only way to create a sustainable self-employed career out of writing. Based on exposure to other writers, I have still observed that most academic writers still tend to do the work part-time to a more stable 9-5 job. A lot of people still consider the field to be a supplementary source of income than an actual career. Of course, this wouldn't include writers who are fully just academic writers as they have made themselves successful in retaining a specific brand imagery for their customers.

As the educational system slowly shifts from an academic to a technical focus, one will notice a slowing down in academic orders. That is because students who opt for technical education do not have a tremendous need for academic writing. They educate their hands regarding a skill after all. Then there is the case of talented students who totally skip the college step in favor of creating start up companies. Again, they do not have any need for academic writing. They do have a need for someone who can write a decent business plan though but still, no academic writing required. Minimal research may be needed but these are information presentations they can do themselves. There might still be a resurgence of academic writing needs among students but for now, academic writers need to learn to diversify to keep the money machine going.