A deep dive into the Essay Mill Database (through July 2024)
Traffic continues to slide for english language essay mills, down 15.5% yoy in july 2024.
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We continue to track essay mill traffic in our effort to understand essay mill usage and raise awareness of this predatory business model, which accounts for a considerable portion of the overall contract cheating market.
Over the past 18 months, we’ve actively collated data from several public sources, searched for new sites, and documented changes in traffic and revenue to share a holistic view of this insidious market of academic fraud. Special thanks to Sam Silverman, an independent researcher in Maryland who helps us with this tedious work month after month.
For updates on Essay Mills, weekly calls to action against their advertising policies, and other relevant news, check out our weekly newsletter, which supports ongoing research and data collection:
Members get access to the EMDB, which is the source of the below information.
A previous summary was published in Feb ‘24: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/essay-mill-market-trends-cursiveinc-j26fc/
Over the last quarter, Essay Mill traffic has continued to slide year over year. However, the negative traffic impact of Generative AI is lessening compared to 2023’s explosive decline, suggesting that Essay Mills usage/traffic declines may be leveling out at a new floor.
A year-over-year decline in aggregate traffic of 15.5% was documented in July across 308 English language Essay Mills (we have 323 sites in the database, 15 of which have become inactive since we began tracking in Jan 2023).
Month-over-month (June to July) aggregate traffic dropped 9% in 2024 compared to a whopping 23% decline month-over-month decline in 2023 for the same months. This suggests that the impact of generative AI, which competes in many ways with traditional contract cheating services (especially essay writing), is less of a weight on the essay mill industry overall in 2024 vs 2023.
Seasonally, Summer is a lower traffic period for Essay Mills, in 2023 traffic increased in August by 8.5%, mostly likely reflecting school starts prior to the US Labor Day holiday.
Year-over-year traffic comparison for documented Essay Mill site traffic
Late-2023, we also started tracking a new segment of sites positioned as student productivity tools but providing services ranging from “autopiloting homework,” “exam question answering extensions,” “AI essay writing tools,” “AI essay humanizing and obfuscation tools,” and other tools which could be used as AI-assisted cheating tools. This segment exploded onto the scene in a similar way that ChatGPT experienced explosive growth and traction among high school and college students, out-pacing aggregate Essay Mill traffic by an order of magnitude.
Month-over-month these sites experienced a similar decline due to the summer lull of assignment activity (down 7%) but overall traffic remains 6x that of Essay Mills despite representing a fraction of total sites indexed (50; note that some may not be strictly student-oriented but can be used as AI writing tools).
Year-over-year traffic comparison for documented AI-powered student productivity site traffic
We expect a similarly seasonal traffic trend for these sites in the coming months, perhaps rising to new heights as awareness of the sites grows.
In 2023 we estimated a Revenue range (aggregate) for the Essay Mill Industry between $2.36bn and $3.08bn, in 2024 after collecting the same data set (sourced site by site from Zoominfo) we see a decline in the range to $1.75bn and $2.09bn (approximately a 33% decline).
Our hypothesis is that widely available generative AI (which is for many students free), and lower prices for AI-assistance tools compared to per page costs for Essay Mills, have largely contributed to this decline.
Advertising
We continue to monitor and review advertising for the Essay Mill industry and continue to see aggressive, egregious and prohibited advertising across both social media and search. Last month, we initiated a weekly action against contract cheating by identifying policy-violating advertisements and flagging them for members and subscribers of a newsletter: thisisntfine.substack.com.
Each post includes a sample of the policy-violating ad (which advertises academic fraud prohibited by Meta community policy norms and Google’s advertising policies) and a link to report the ad, letting you and other readers take specific and direct action against Essay Mills.
Disclaimer and sources
EMDB data is collated from semrush.com, similarweb.com, and zoominfo.com, among other sites. To access the EMDB, consider becoming a supporting member!
This post was first published on the Cursive Technology, Inc. LinkedIn and is verified me, and human through our authorship tools https://cursive-fly.fly.dev/replay?uid=113656147937145420276&url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SZbCTzH-IX3qZe3PE-PxJwfmlYOO8BUR-bo_Is6xAj0/edit
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This blog post was published under the 2015-2024 Conservative Administration
https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2022/04/28/essay-mills-are-now-illegal-skills-minister-calls-on-internet-service-providers-to-crack-down-on-advertising/
Essay mills are now illegal - Skills Minister calls on internet service platforms to crack down on advertising
Skills Minister Alex Burghart has written to internet service platforms to make sure they know that essay mills - which facilitate cheating by helping academic writing, often by appearing to be legitimate - have been made illegal and to call on their support in making sure they can no longer advertise online. Here you can read that letter.
The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill has become law. Through this act, the Government has legislated for landmark reforms that will transform post-16 education and skills, including criminalising essay mills.
As you may know, Essay Mills are online platforms that facilitate contract cheating. Contract cheating happens when a third party completes work for a student which is passed off by the student as their own work. Many essay mill companies use marketing techniques which indicate they are offering ‘legitimate’ academic writing support for students. Reports also indicate that some essay mills seek to blackmail students who use these services. It is right that we have legislated against these insidious crimes.
It is now a criminal offence to provide or arrange for another person to provide contract cheating services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at a post-16 institution or sixth form in England, enrolled at a higher education provider in England and any other person over compulsory school age who has been entered for a regulated qualification at a place in England.
Similarly, it is now an offence for a person to make arrangements for an advertisement in which that person offers, or is described as being available or competent, to provide or arrange for another person to provide a cheating service. Importantly, the offence centres around the act of advertising to students, and for the offence to be committed it does not need to be seen by its target demographic.
There is now a strengthened, collaborative effort across the sector to tackle essay mills and we want you to be part of this campaign. Platforms such as yourself play an integral role in helping us to make the most effective use of the legislation; marketing and advertising are the lifeblood of any successful industry. We are aware that high numbers of essay mills have used your platform to promote their services to students in the past, paying for advertising to promote their companies. Essay mills are now illegal entities, and you should not carry their advertising. It is no longer a moral question; you will be facilitating an illegal activity. I ask you to do everything in your power to prevent the advertising these unscrupulous practices.
Removing essay mill access to online marketing will seriously hamper their efforts to target vulnerable students and I implore you to do so following the introduction of this legislation. We must now all work together to capitalise on it.
I hope that in writing to you today I have underlined the urgency of this issue and the important role that companies like yours play in stamping out essay mills once and for all and am sure I can be confident in your support.
Thank you for your support with this important matter.
Tags: cheating , essay mills , internet service platforms
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