Traffic continues to slide for English language Essay Mills, down 15.5% YOY in July 2024

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: https://thisisntfine.substack.com/. Members get access to the EMDB, which is the source of the below information.?

A previous summary was published in Feb ‘24: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/essay-mill-market-trends-cursiveinc-j26fc/?

TL;DR?

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.

Traffic

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 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.?

The most popular Essay Mills by traffic are IvyPanda.com, EduBirdie.com, EssayPro.com, and PapersOwl.com, with 100s of 1000s visitors each month and aggressive marketing campaigns.

Rise of AI

In mid-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 on to 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).?

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.

Revenue

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.??

Sources & disclaimer

We use several sites to estimate traffic, including similarweb.com and semrush.com. Zoominfo.com provides some estimation of revenue. This public information is sourced as consistently as possible to ensure longitudinal apples-to-apples comparisons. If and when we are forced to estimate traffic due to missing data, we try to call that out.

This article's grammar was corrected using Grammarly's browser based tool, all other writing is by Joseph Thibault and authorship is verified via Cursive Technology, Inc : https://cursive-fly.fly.dev/replay?uid=113656147937145420276&url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SZbCTzH-IX3qZe3PE-PxJwfmlYOO8BUR-bo_Is6xAj0/edit