From all of the indications I can follow, these essay writing services seem to be reasonably busy and to generate at least modest revenues.
What I can't figure out, however, is how these modest revenues translate to reasonable ROI.
Most appear to charge about $10/page (give or take). Nobody can really produce much more than 2 decent pages per hour, especially if they want to write in different voices applicable to the content, course level and type of university.
Hell, about half of my income comes from writing. I have written in all formats, for all publications and even written essays for a couple of friends. And I write damned fast. But shit if I could ever write more than 2 decent pages an hour...
So they average $20/hr, then they have to deal with vendor fees, communications (not always so intuitive for non DNM types), and the hassle of transferring bitcoins into dollars. And for what, $60.00?
One saving grace in all of this is that TAs and professors rarely read these essays very carefully. I know that most of my colleagues (grad students/professors) admit to as much. So to this end the material is not necessarily scrutinized as carefully as one might assume.
And of course this being DNMs, I suppose it would be possible to grab an essay from another market and replace some content in a sort of "mad lib" fashion...
Still, this seems like a tough way to make a few bucks.
Here's an article from a while back written by one of those paper writers. I found it Really fascinating.
To your question specifically: "It is late in the semester when the business student contacts me, a time when I typically juggle deadlines and push out 20 to 40 pages a day. " & "I will make roughly $66,000 this year."
Also: "It's not implausible to write a 75-page paper in two days. It's just miserable. I don't need much sleep, and when I get cranking, I can churn out four or five pages an hour."
Great read - I highly recommend it. Not surprisingly, it's longer than it needs to be. :)
I didn't realize these writers were also on DNM. Huh.