Freelance writing mills are ubiquitous online: generally, they demand that you devote hours of your time building your reputation and profile on what is essentially an eBay for tedious, lifeless copywriting. The rewards are minor. While Dan Baum gripes on Twitter about being paid $90,000 a year to write for the New Yorker, writers on the other end of the pay scale are doing it for pennies—or worse—a percentage of potential AdSense revenue.

It’s seductive to anyone who writes for cash money in what may be the worst economic and cultural climate to do so since the Dark Ages (at least for the majority of writers not on the Conde Nast gravy train). With my bank account is often teetering precariously above overdraft gulch, I completely understand the argument for earning a few bucks in PayPal tender by slamming out a how-to-pimp-your-Firefox tutorial.

I totally get it. When times are tight, even pennies on the dollar for a skill seem worth it. But in the long run, you’re essentially selling old books and CD’s to record or book stores to get you through the rest of the week, while selling off your primary skill in favor of a degraded market value.

There’s no shame in doing menial or distasteful or annoying work when you’re broke–waiting tables at a TGI Friday’s, ripping out weeds, writing SQL queries, sucking cock for real money. Shit, I taught myself HTML between spraying shoes at a bowling alley at the age of 25. But when your time is limited–as it is for everyone–you’ve got to ask whether it’s worth your time. Is it worth the hour you’ll spend writing SEO-optimized text about banal subjects in the most bloodless manner possible for a theoretical payday of pennies? For some people it may be.

I’m the king of menial jobs, or odd jobs, or whatever have you. I’ve certainly done plenty of labor for less than my time is worth that has been soul-destroying, frustrating, or somewhat distasteful. But many of the lamest of these jobs–bartending for no hourly wage, and approximately $3/hr in tips, for example–have offered some sort of perk or perks that has made it worth the time. Potential additional odd jobs, free beer, networking opportunities—all possible perks to ameliorate the inequitable time/money ratio.

Staring at these writing mills, I gotta ask: what are the perks of writing for potential nickels on the web, if any? Is there more long-term value in writing what you want for free?

I have a personal rubric by which I measure a writing job’s: every week, I write show previews for the Santa Cruz Weekly, $15 for 150 words a piece. It’s not always the most inspiring work, writing six vaguely-positive sentences about Slightly Stoopid, but I find that it’s more than worth my time. If it takes me approximately an hour and a half a week to write four previews, at $60 a week, for $240 a month in guaranteed money, and from time to time I can have fun with the form, well shit, seems like a pretty good deal to me. Some Ivy League douche who moonlights for the New Yorker might find this distasteful, call it hack work, but in comparison to other things I’ve been paid to do for nominal amounts—spray out bowling shoes, scoop bum shit off the floor of a public restroom–it seems like a pretty good deal. There are plenty of perks: the ability to occasionally let loose on a band that really deserves it (see: any Jared Leto musical project,) an ongoing open dialog with my editors, and the ability to pay a couple bills at the end of the month that I’d otherwise be selling books to pay.

Some of these benefits are tangible, others are intangible, but in aggregate, the writing job is worth my time.

Recently, I signed up for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, more out of curiosity than as an actual money-making proposition. The prospect of making a few bucks to do menial tasks mindlessly on my laptop while watching boring nature documentaries sounded decent, so, why not? I’ve been on it for a couple of weeks, and I can see it being a great way to make some extra beer or coffee money when times are tight and work isn’t coming in as quickly as you’d like. But it is far from a substitute for real work—it’s the digital equivalent to filling envelopes in your free time. A few cents a job to idly Google song lyrics while watching TV is a fair deal to me.

And that’s what comprises a ton of the work on Mechanical Turk: idly Googling information, and copying and pasting it into a text box. Sounds great, so long as you confine yourself to that sort of busy work. As a freelance writer’s market, it’s shit (to be charitable) or profoundly depressing (to be honest.) If you search for top-paying jobs on the site, a lot of writing jobs appear. On Mechanical Turk, a $1 job is relatively lucrative. Writing jobs on the site will earn you a whopping $1-$3 usually involve writing 6-800 words, potential rewrites included.

An argument could be made that $1 for 600 words is what the Internet market will bear, and perhaps that’s true, but if so, then it’s time to find another line of work. Writing 600 words of copy about a subject that you have no passion for or interest in, for $1, is never worth your time. It’s insulting. It’s demeaning. There’s more dignity in turning tricks on the street or spraying disinfectant into sweaty bowling shoes than selling off your writing talents for such a paltry sum. It’s never worth writing for nickels, even in this fearless new Internet economy.