If it’s 9pm, and you’d rather be in bed that writing your newsletter (helloooo!!), American website Constant Content might have the answer.

It’s a network of 50,000 authors, and has a catalogue of hundreds of thousands of stories for you to pluck and put into position in a last minute rush.

I registered for the site and got a call from account manager, Sienna – pretty good customer service – who kindly agreed to an interview about the site.

It was started six years ago, and is a division of Revenue Wire, an e-commerce company. Sienna says: “Having unique content is not only going to meet our clients’ search engine optimisation (SEO) objectives, and attract clients to their site, it also provides the client with information and a call to action to do business.

“If you doing business these days you need a website and if you have a website you need content.”

There are a range of licences for the catalogued copy. You can buy the rights to “do as you please” to the story, including rewrite it, with no credit to the writer; buy the right to be the only publisher of the story, with byline (writer retains some privelidges), or buy the right to publish it with no guarantee that it is unique.

Prices vary, but Sienna says the average is between eight and 10 cents a word (I shouldn’t be telling you this). The writer gets 70% of the sale.

Constant Content is now branching out into customised content and will select a writer from its bank of 70,000 with a style that suits your brand. The average word rate is about the same, too.

I suggested that writers might find it hard to survive on that kind of pay rate, but in fact, most rival sites in the US charge as little as two cents, according to Sienna. “We are considered a premium site.”

The site’s 50 or so staff review every piece of content, whether for the catalogue or custom work, which each accounts for about 50% of the site’s revenue.

Australians are writing for the site, and also buying content. While the bulk of its clients are small business, the company also services very large corporate clients.