Inside an essay mill: Two month’s worth of orders
All of this data comes from a message board of the actual essay mill I used to work for. While it may not be representive of the whole essay mill market (since I assume all essay mills have their own niche market).
Please keep in mind I am still collecting and compiling the dataset and this is a summary of only the first 4% of the data. I will be updating this post periodically as I keep adding new orders. To encourage me to do it faster, you can signup to access the dataset here :).
Key notes / Summary
- Q: How many orders per day does an essay mill get on average?
- A: ~5. There were 323 orders recieved over 67 days. Further, the max/min range was (19, 2) – hence there was no day an order wasn’t placed.
- Q:What subjects/academic disciplines are most frequently ordered?
- A: Business papers accounted for ~37% of the orders, and English and Psychology were the second most popular at ~11%.
- Q: Students of which academic level are prone to outsource the most?
- A: Undergraduate. 70.6% of the orders studied are for an undergraduate level.
- Q: Which length of papers are outsourced the most?
- A: Papers which were 1-4 pages in length were the most popular. Generally, shorter papers appear to be more poplar.
- Q: Which deadline is the most popular?
- A: Keep in mind ‘deadline’ here means the time the students gives to the essay mill. The most popular deadline was 1-2 days.
Data Source / How the data is collected
Just to give you a bit more context in how the data is collected, in short when an essay mill recieves an ‘order’ they published it on a Google Group from where the writers would pickup any papers they liked by replying ‘taken’ – there’s a Liam Neeson joke here somewhere.
Anyway, so, the main page looks a bit like this (personal details are redacted):

Once you click on any post, you get to the ‘order details’, where every post contains the details of the order (what they want the writer to do) which look something like this:

So, all I have done, is to just take details of all of the orders and collected them in a spreadsheet to analyze and summarize.
Summary of order details / Descriptive Statistics
Order Volume: Number of orders per Day

Subject Type: What subjects are ‘ordered’ the most?

Academic Level: What academic Level is ordered the most?

Number of Pages: The length of the papers outsourced the most.

Deadlines: What is the most common deadline?
