Essay Mill Market Trend

• 47% decline in traffic yoy for Essay Mills
• We added a new category ("AI cheating tech") which is 3x Essay Mill traffic

We’ve been keeping the Essay Mill Database up to date on a monthly basis (Feb ‘24 numbers will be out mid-March) but it’s been a while since we posted about them.?

This month, we added a new category labeled “AI Cheating Tech.” This isn’t a widely used phrase, we're using it to highlight a mixed bag of tools and services that either actively circumvent academic integrity tools like AI classifiers or Plagiarism detectors or are designed to be (or could be) used during assessments.?

Among our list, a few are for answering quiz/multiple choice questions, several are explicitly for writing papers (but offer some pretty amazing productivity tools as well), and still others are explicitly advertised as tools to “Bypass AI Detectors” (below). Several have very legitimate business use cases for content marketing and copywriting and require some additional research.?

Unfortunately, we haven't tracked these for as long, so the chart appears that they came out of nowhere (the reality is that they were not yet on the radar, and Similarweb, which provides the rest of the data, is only a 3-month look back).

Chart Updates:

The big news is when we look at year-over-year data (now that we have a full 12 months captured). Jan ‘23 vs Jan ‘24 is down almost 50% (47.7%!) for the essay mill traffic we found/sourced.?

Month-over-month, from Dec ‘23 to Jan ‘24, we saw a slight decline in traffic to Essay Mills and AI Cheating Tech sites (perhaps attributable to the end of the semester, holiday, and beginning of Spring ‘24 semesters).?

ChatGPT traffic was slightly down over the same period (perhaps unsurprising as Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, X, and a host of other AI companies have turned their own AI chat tools on). There was slight growth in traffic to what we’ve categorized as homework-help sites (led by Chegg and Quizlet).?

Thoughts ("I" = Joe):

A 50% decrease in traffic to any industry would be a “hair on fire” situation for the business leaders (based on the industry, should it be “pants on fire” ?). The availability of easy AI content generation and AI cheating technology is a good bet for the cause of this decline, which in that context might be more of a migration between services for students looking for an easier path (apply any euphemism you like here, “lazy learners,” “cheaters,” “dishonest students,” etc.).

If we put this in context, a recent Stanford study findings on high school cheating: “There’s been a ton of media coverage about AI making it easier and more likely for students to cheat…But we haven’t seen that bear out in our data.” They concluded that AI hasn’t changed how much cheating there is. By widening the aperture to include contract cheating/essay mills and considering that the same conclusion might apply to users of essay mills (post-secondary edu), I do think it can be said that it’s changing how students cheat (to the detriment of ghostwriters and essay mills).?

Over the last quarter, traffic looks to have steadied (even experiencing a seasonal bump during the Fall semester); Dec ‘23 to Jan ‘24, traffic was down 6% for Essay Mills overall. I am eager to see if the downward trend continues from Jan to Feb.?

Comments, questions, concerns?

At Cursive Technology, Inc we're still all in on student effort (if you're curious about this post check out the stats here: https://cursive-fly.fly.dev/[email protected]&url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1taV99ZTPry39Oh-J7WyVI71-vk5R604Z4StSgRQ9TDM/edit)