First, a little about us. Phrasemaker is a Perth-based news outlet run by Branden Zavaleta, Grace Black, Tarun Sayal, & Branden Lizardi. Started in 2024, the site is growing quickly. We’re recognised as a news outlet by Google, consistently rank at the top of searches, and counted 173k views this month.
If you’re interested in writing with us, the pitch is that it’s like Substack, but with ads on your articles and a team to support you.
Basically, you can write on your own schedule, in your own niche, but get the benefits of having a resptable publication behind you and get paid in ad revenue too.
Requirements
Depending on your level of expertise, we’ll start you at different points.
If you’ve written as a list/guide/review writer before, we’ll start you on our bounty board, a list of available articles to be written organised by our editorial team. Our editors take a 10% cut from your revenue for researching and optimizing these.
If you’re a journalist or editor whose worked with major publications, you can jump right into writing what you know performs, or creating topics for our bounty board for that 10% cut.
Pay
Pay is a big sticking point for one reason: ad providers don’t pay monthly. Not only that, they pay out 65 days after the end of that month. Basically, if you write something on January 1st and it hits big, racking up 20,000 views in a week, you won’t see that money until April 5th.
The upside is that you have a much higher earning potential then you see at any other publication.
Take the average content mill for example. They’ll pay you $15US for a list that gets 4k views. We get an RPM of $17 so at that rate, the ads will have made $68. Big difference. Now imagine that you write a piece that goes viral and hits 40k views, or even 400k. As our site grows, so will our RPMs and our articles will rank higher on Google too, so both views and revenue will continue to increase (Nov 2025 saw a 50% increase in RPM over Oct 2025 alone).
*That said, there is a 5% fee for all site revenue to contribute to overheads. So your revenue share will be 95% or 85% if you’re working off the bounty board (the 10% goes to the editors).
Training & Benefits
We do have some onboarding and training to help you maximise viewership, but for reliable pay, you’ll want to already have an understanding of SEO, promoting your stories, and how to get views.
Lastly, there is free stuff. Tech to review (and keep), game codes to play, early access to movies, local premiere invitations, and more (you’re free to reach out to brands and PR about products or events too).
To inquire, send us an email about you and your writing experience to:
editor@thephrasemaker.com or brandenzavaleta+pm@gmail.com
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