In this article on KeenGamer, I talk about how I became a freelance journalist. More specifically, I discuss how I began my career, transitioned into the video game journalism field, and started to make money writing about video games. Currently, I’m a full-time content writer for the marketing team at Gengo (a Lionbridge company) in Tokyo, Japan.
On the side, I write for various publications covering the video game, anime, and pop culture beat. When I first started out, I was writing clickbait and getting paid based on the amount of views the article received. This payment style is good if the article does well. My best-performing article brought me just over $700 USD! The article took me around 5-6 hours to complete. Thus, the per-hour rate was incredibly high for this article.
However, if the article does poorly, you may get paid close to nothing. My worst-performing article I can recall brought me around $16 USD. Now, one of my recurring gigs pays me around $90 USD per 800-word article, regardless of whether it gets a lot of views or not.
Another one of my major side gigs pays a recurring royalty based on the total amount of views our articles bring in, regardless of when the article was published. On this website, articles I wrote last year are still earning me cash to this day.
If you want to learn how I got to this current point in my career, read the article on KeenGamer to learn tips on how to write about video games and find video game journalist job opportunities.
One thought on “How to Break Into Video Game Journalism”