PLR: Legitimate Business Model or Morally Bankrupt?

I went over to InkThinker the other day and found an interesting article on PLR (Private Label Rights) articles. For those who don't know, writers sell PLR articles numerous times rather than just one time. There are two basic ways to sell PLR articles. With the first method, you set up a cheap subscription service that delivers dozens of articles per month to customers on a variety of topics. With the second, you sell "packs" of articles on different topics, and you let your customers buy what they want without subscribing.

At first glance, PLR looks like it might be fairly lucrative. But I've seen writers argue that it's not only a bad business decision, but it's morally wrong. I'm on the fence about this. I'm not sure PLR is for me, but I'm not convinced it's the devil, either--and I know a number of experienced freelance web writers who include it as part of their business model. I don't sell PLR and I'm not promoting it here--I have absolutely no reason to--but some objections to it strike me as a bit overblown. Here are the arguments I've come across on why PLR is the spawn of Satan--and my responses to these arguments.

PLR articles simply rehash the same content over and over--and that's bad for the Internet. Many people buy PLR articles to provide quick, ready-made content to get a site going. I absolutely believe that original content will do better things for a website than rehashed PLR--but some people can't afford the thousands of dollars it would cost to hire a quality writer to build a comprehensive content library from scratch. That's where PLR supposedly comes in.

I agree that it's probably not great to keep recycling the same old content on the web, but I'm a bit of a hypocrite--I've already published quite a few articles on sites like EzineArticles, where they've been syndicated to other websites. I've increased my SEO rankings for targeted keywords a great deal this way--it's done a lot for my business. I've never heard the same objections raised against article marketing. Some writers might say "well, yes, but with article marketing at least you get lots of links back to your site." To which I respond: "well, yes, and with PLR at least you get paid."

In addition, not everybody who buys PLR just posts it on their sites without changing it. Most webmasters these days are aware that Google penalizes duplicate content, which is why those who buy PLR sometimes rewrite or use the articles simply for a research source--or they might use them for an offline newsletter, brochure, or report. That's not to say that clients wouldn't be better served with original content that's tailored to them; but not all PLR just gets posted online as-is.

PLR articles undermine the copywriting industry. The problem with PLR is that it's cheap. You sell a pack of ten articles fifty times for $10 each instead of once for $25 each. I've heard writers argue that PLR is bad for all writers, because it floods the market with cheap writing.

But just in case you haven't noticed, the market is already flooded. You can get original content for cheaper than some PLR packs. Somehow, writers who charge a fair wage still stay in business; that's because some clients know the value of professional, personally-tailored copy that's designed to generate sales or make their site the resource in a certain niche. They can already get original content for pennies on the dollars you're charging, but they don't. My hunch is they don't want PLR content, either.

From what I've seen, the people who buy PLR articles are not the same people who buy fairly priced content. They're the people who buy $5 articles from India. They're the people who reject your Elance bid because it's "too high"--you dared to charge more than a fraction of a penny per word.

PLR articles are crap writing. I've also heard some claims that PLR writing perpetuates badly written, grammatically incorrect and badly researched trash content. I don't subscribe to any PLR services, so I can't judge whether it's any good as a whole. However, I do feel that PLR can't be any different from other types of writing--some of it's probably crap. Some of it might be decent. Just because it's sold multiple times doesn't mean it's automatically bad. And I know that original content can be absolutely horrible--originality is no guarantee of quality.

I'm not convinced about PLR articles for my own business, but I'm in favor of keeping a fair, objective opinion on it--and I don't look down on writers who offer it. There will always be cheap writing out there that undercuts your prices. To compete, you can't expect to stem the tide. It didn't work for record companies to eradicate song downloads; instead, they joined the market by offering affordable, legal downloads--and made money on the new trend. I don't see anything wrong with writers doing the same thing. Selling one article for $10 might not be worth it. But selling one article fifty times for $10 might be smart business.