– Why pay a copywriter when you can buy words for $2.50 a page?

A colleague of mine (a technologist who turns knobs up and down to trick people into visiting his clients’ websites) enjoys mocking creative services. The other day he sent me a link to an Indian company selling wordsmith ‘services’ for $2.50 a page. “There you go. You’ll be out of business when this catches on,” he gleefully predicted.

“You should try it,” I said. “I reckon five bucks will vastly improve your website.”

The flattened world and cheaper tools of the creative trades – cameras, graphic and web design packages, blogs and other publishing tools, music composition programmes, email marketing automation, so on and so forth – are, we’re told, threatening traditional service provision. Supplier pools are now ocean sized and do-it-yourself has never been easier.

But, like Lisa Simpson said: “Better technology doesn’t mean better storytelling.” The democratisation of tools hasn’t democratised skill. Little wonder Google is the world’s most valuable company when so much sifting is required to find the good stuff.

Most reasonable thinking people don’t want words by the page. They want to say something that arrests attention and gets people talking. They’re quite relaxed about word count. Probably why Nike paid many millions of dollars for three simple words all currently listed in the dictionary: Just do it.

Don’t buy the hype.

Pay for the good stuff.