1. High quality content will eventually win. Quality is very important to any business in any industry, just think about Starbucks, Costco... Their products are of good quality and excellent customer service. That's why they thrive, even in a bad economy. The same with websites with good quality content I think.

2. Google will go down, if they don't tackle the content farm issue. I think so far Google has been holding steady about the search market share, just because they did a decent job of filtering out the bad/spam content. But, I can also see that there are a ton of content mill articles popping up in google search results. So, this is a dangerous crack.

Some one above mentioned p2p recommendation, that's kind of one way that might topple google's lead in search.

pratikdiyet.com

Watler

honestly, i don't think google is in any kind of trouble because there are far more people who don't care for "quality content" and are satisfied w/just getting an answer. for those who care, ahearn clearly sees them as a market and rightfully submits that they can be monetized differently. not many of the so-called quality content sites can get their readers to pay for their content, hence they are left to advertising biz models, and in such cases are heavily threatened by these content-farms that are getting the lions share of the traffic.

i really love reading rww and would submit that it is a source of high quality content, but would i pay for it? honestly, until faced w/that prospect, i don't know. however, i also don't see it as being danger fm these content-farms because of the niche not necessarily being broad enough for the content-farms biz model.Sach

rasoulallah

mohamed

muslm

Thanks and Regards

nice discussion..

but, what mr.google is the boss for internet???

Today the bar has been raised a little but we are still seeing similar attempts as your article describes nicely.

Junk farms use software to raid the web for content on a keyword, patch bits of it together and call it a "new" article. They then spam it everywhere they can stick it on the web.

Riddle Me This Though: If spam software is capable of reading content on the web based on a keyword and extracting sentences, why can't (vastly superior funded) Google - and thus exclude those spam content pieces? Could it be it isn't in Google's best interests given that MANY Google Adwords customers use this very same spam-a-lot model?

i agree you man !

i agree you man !
thanks kenny !

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I think the question will be, what quality level will the mass production be able to achieve. There will be a limit, and sites that take a more authoritative view and give trust a boost within their content (like www.thefreeresource.com does) will win in the long run. I guess it's the different between a mass produced car and a hand crafted car. Which will last longer and have less issues? I put my money on the hand crafted vehicle. I think the same is true with the large sites that rely on mass but have little quality behind each article. We recently saw this with QA sites and will soon see it with content farms that don't live up to Google's and the users standards.

Junk farms use software to raid the web for content on a keyword, patch bits of it together and call it a "new" article. They then spam it everywhere they can stick it on the web.

Riddle Me This Though: If spam software is capable of reading content on the web based on a keyword and extracting sentences, why can't (vastly superior funded) Google - and thus exclude those spam content pieces? Could it be it isn't in Google's best interests given that MANY Google Adwords customers use this very same spam-a-lot model?

i agree you !
thanks
samuel.

i hope justice will come to this earth

As someone who is interested in internet marketing, but still prefers to hand write my own content I welcome something like this. Having to compete with people who have no issues creating 1k crappy back links for themselves per hour using some bot. While I write for weeks on end, writing quality articles for off-site- and on-site-content. only to end up with 15 or 20 backlinks.

Don't get me wrong, I do fairly well in the rankings for my niche terms, but I cant beat the black hatters at the broader market level.

Its really to bad, if people would just click the bottom couple links of page one more often, they would find exactly what they were looking for.

Junk farms use software to raid the web for content on a keyword, patch bits of it together and call it a "new" article. They then spam it everywhere they can stick it on the web.

Riddle Me This Though: If spam software is capable of reading content on the web based on a keyword and extracting sentences, why can't (vastly superior funded) Google - and thus exclude those spam content pieces? Could it be it isn't in Google's best interests given that MANY Google Adwords customers use this very same spam-a-lot model?
thx.
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In terms of quality, I have my reservations. Yes, they have strict editorial guidelines and care about accuracy and spelling/grammar but my impression is that it's more about SEO than usefulness or creativity.

For example, something came up on the topic of rollerblade safety and I was interested since I like to skate and it would not have required too much research on my part. The guidelines are very strict about not changing the title and answering the question of the title and to ask any questions you need to before you write the piece. My dilemma was over the term 'rollerblade'. Rollerblades are a brand of inline skate, but they are often used as a generic word. I asked if I should write about Rollerblade the brand or about inline skating in general. I suggested that it would be more useful to people if I wrote about safety in inline skating more generally. If they wanted the title to stay the same for SEO purposes (since I guess more people would be searching for info about rollerblades than inline skates), then I would clarify the terms in the article itsefl. But no, they wanted me to find something to say specifically about safety with Rollerblade the brand. Totally ridiculous!

Same goes for people's attention. There might be room for both a Carls Jr and an In n Out in the same market but they are still in competition. The same person is not going to buy a burger from both chains for the same meal.

Every article must adhere to strict structure guidelines and requires at least 3 reputable sources to back up the facts stated therein. It is not an SEO situation where we're forced to repeat keywords over and over (which I've done for other companies), but a legitimate way to get answers to the most frequently asked questions in health, fashion, travel, science and hundreds of other topics. They pay a fair, living wage for the content I provide, which is more than can be said for most freelance writing jobs out there today.

Oh, and all Livestrong writers MUST have a background in nutrition, psychiatry, physical training or another health field in order to be considered for the job.

- http://bit.ly/cBdX2z for a HIT example (asking to write a Q&A about "multifunctional furniture")

- and the poor result on Askville: http://bit.ly/d8dmfE (result created without fully understanding that the example provided should not be copied as is)

What part of the UGC is done like this? Is it the only way to bootstrap a web service nowadays?

Main company name is krishaweb that stolen my content and placed in their another domain, i have sent them a warning email still no action has been taken by them, i have also submitted spam report to Google, but Google also not taking any action, even google pushing them high on searh results. which is really bad for me.

I know when they continue do high promotions on their website with my content, Google will treat it original content and banned my site as duplicate content…this is really a BIG BUG on Google Algorithm.

I would like to ask Google, they have any program that filter website pages by the content creation date and index by the Google and how they know which site has original content…as this website using all the credibility of my website content…which is wrong…

kindly pass this information to Googlers so they have open their eyes and stop this kind of SPAM as well.

thanks for your great information.

I just keep continually "X"ing them out of my search results so that they don't appear in my google searches anymore… but sadly they still do…

My first thought was, "shouldn't someone who regularly writes for the paper do this?" And since I have a friend who works at (un)said paper, I also worried that I would be contributing to the downsizing they are experiencing.

But I did it anyway. Why? Well, I love to write. I don't get to do that enough at my current position. I wanted to add to my portfolio. And yes, I needed the money, and it was decent pay considering the assignment was actually something I was interested in.

Prior to my first assignment, I had not heard of Demand Media and didn't realize they were so hated by content professionals. Seeing all the recent hate being thrown their way, I can understand the negativity towards them. The internet is full of worthless, meaningless content, and that some of this content rises to the top of search engines is really frustrating. And even more frustrating are the cases where real, professional writers are getting the shaft thanks to the farmed content. Yes, that blows. But I guess I just wanted to speak from the mindset of someone who has done work for the enemy. I can't speak for all the little how-to pieces they produce, because I've never written any of those and don't plan to. But I will tell you that my articles were looked at closely by (at least) two editors. When they weren't certain about some of my facts, they let me know so I could provide more information from my research (in the last article I submitted, the one item they were questioning was removed, even though I had fact-checked it. I suppose they just wanted to be absolutely sure it was all accurate.). When it was all said and done, I put a lot of time and effort into researching and writing my articles, and I feel like the editors did a good job of asking the right questions and making improvements where they were needed. The result, I believe, was a piece of content that was informative and well-written. And it came from a content farm.

(I also question relying so much on Google for determining a source's credibility anyway. And we all know that blogs are a crap shoot anyway, as far as their accuracy and credibility. But that's another comment!)

The top search terms are all heavily gamed. Obscure physics or electronics concepts, not so much.

Social media is important, and it hasn't escaped me that Wikipedia is basically a social media application. So I guess I do rely heavily on social media for research, it's just that I prefer the organization of Wikipedia to the chaos and trolling of Twitter et al.

The distressing "crap farm" I found in April, "Expert Village" has been changed!

The new site is Demand Media's "eHow." The crap content I disliked is unchanged of course.

Google Drops Answers.com For Google Definitions

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021370.html

When I pointed this out to one of the sites and recommended that they consider paying professional writers a living wage, I was told that they have many 'professionals' working for them. However, the quality of the content leads me to believe that the 'professionals' are NOT professional writers--

So, I have refused to work for any of these sites. The vast majority of my cohort also will not work for them. This is one really big reason that these content farms are so full of junk. I'm quite upset about the whole thing, especially as you know that the site owners are raking in big bucks from ad revenues.

Alert to content farms: Pay us pros a decent rate and the quality of your content will rise substantially. You'll be doing both the reading public and us writers a big favor.

PageRank was an early attempt to replicate this RW social filtering through the medium of web links, but PageRank's hit the limits of its effectiveness and we now find ourselves in need of a new standard for social filtering on the web.

One solution I've been evangelizing recently is to track reputation against authors rather than URLs - a 'PageRank for People'. Think of it as a portable reputation system for the web - a way of using the authority of content creators (instead of URLs) to collectively filter content.

Here's a couple of write-ups for more info - I'd welcome any comments/criticisms, just trying to jumpstart conversation in the area:

'Social Search and Distributed Reputation Systems' (Presented at SES Chicago 2009): http://bit.ly/4YhXq4

'Docs are Old-School, We Need PageRank for People': http://www.bit.ly/128U9V

They weren't fired from better jobs because their writing was terrible. Budget cuts, magazines going under...all took their toll. Content farms pay and pay regularly and can help fill gaps till another job comes along. Don't think good to great writers hang out at these places. Check out some of the newer writing. It could be on the front page of a daily paper - an excellent daily paper!

Then there are a surprising number of writers who actually don't know how well they write and their material turns up all over the place. It is easy to say that "quality" content shows up only at certain sites and not others but spend time reading the work of writers at those sites and you could be surprised.

Readers want to find quality content. But it isn't easy to weed out the search results to only find that content. Maybe someday it will be. Until then, the more specific the search, the better the info may be. Instead of "dog tricks" look for "how to teach an old dog how to roll over". Instead of "Home Renovation" look for "How to Redo a (type of ) Kitchen for under (dollar amount). Fill in the blanks and get searchers something to find.

Unique titles, unique content. It is out there, even at the
sites known for "poor" content.

I think you should focus on tools that let people filter these sites better and/or more policing.

I want to see an article outside of the "I'm trusting Twitter" that people are using.

Junk farms use software to raid the web for content on a keyword, patch bits of it together and call it a "new" article. They then spam it everywhere they can stick it on the web.

Riddle Me This Though: If spam software is capable of reading content on the web based on a keyword and extracting sentences, why can't (vastly superior funded) Google - and thus exclude those spam content pieces? Could it be it isn't in Google's best interests given that MANY Google Adwords customers use this very same spam-a-lot model?

honestly, i don't think google is in any kind of trouble because there are far more people who don't care for "quality content" and are satisfied w/just getting an answer. for those who care, ahearn clearly sees them as a market and rightfully submits that they can be monetized differently. not many of the so-called quality content sites can get their readers to pay for their content, hence they are left to advertising biz models, and in such cases are heavily threatened by these content-farms that are getting the lions share of the traffic.

i really love reading rww and would submit that it is a source of high quality content, but would i pay for it? honestly, until faced w/that prospect, i don't know. however, i also don't see it as being danger fm these content-farms because of the niche not necessarily being broad enough for the content-farms biz model.

With such a massive change in the available content it is likely that Google will take a fundamental and wholesale look at search results in order to produce the best results they can for any given search term. Content Farms, social media bookmarks blogs and Twitter are all likely to be looked at very carefully before any weighting is attached to them.

In general Google and SEOs have been playing chess with each other since Google was launched with Google looking to produce the best results, and SEOs looking for any new way they can to weight the results in their favour. I see this as just another exchange in the bigger game, with the most likely result that Google will make some good choices and the search game will be changed again.

A bigger question is where does that leave publishers who will then be firmly hidden behind their paywalls?

For a digital marketing agency like us we look at the field of battle for SEO and offer the most ethical, relevant and effective services we can to clients. If the masters of the world decide to make article farms impractical and ineffective then I can't imagine that they will remain in business too much longer without adapting to the new rules.

Whilst your article is interesting I don’t therefore think it’s a question of what we should do so much as wait and see what the message is from the mountain.

The problem with McDonald’s content is that (a) it is very cheap and (b) it is a mass consumer product and whilst it is low margin, it sells and makes money. Sadly most consumers, and all servers, have no taste. Contrast that with a meal from ElBulli restaurant where there is a 2 year waiting list for diners, prices are high although the business will never make the kind of money that McDonalds does.

I know where I would eat. The problem with search engines is that they seem to reward McDonalds over ElBulli every time. You can read some thoughts on possible solutions here: http://thebln.com/2009/12/machines-like-empty-calories-too-but-they-lack-the-taste-to-distinguish-good-and-bad/

Personally I think search has too great an importance - and I can see it losing ground to p2p recommendation.

The web will favor smart aggregators that focus on quality, not quantity. Attention data is one important, but not sufficient factor for surfacing quality. You need special curation and algorithms on top of that.

A tiering is emerging definitely: a) traditional media, b) core web, c) content farms.

"The reality, however, is unfortunately different. Other websites can and do link to poor quality content. Why? Often because they can't find any better content."

Except that this isn't a trend that I've noticed with any great regularity. Reputation and authority have a way of overcoming this.

"Or maybe because the poor quality content was the first article about a certain topic and therefore gained early traction (important when building page rank)."

It's not that important. Yes, as Seth Godin would say, ideas that spread win. But he also says that it's very common that the first instance of an idea does not spread and someone takes its template and then does it better. So even if someone is first in line with a notion, they're frequently not the authority on it because someone else makes a better article about it.

"I see what you're saying re link economy, but I've seen far too many instances of page 1 of a Google search for a popular term being littered with what I would consider poor quality blogs. Think about it, these blogs and sites like DM pump out *thousands* of new pieces of content each day. The sad fact is that statistically a percentage of those will in some way go viral or simply strike the Google jackpot and become a big page view generator."

I haven't seen this at all. Mostly when I search for just about anything I get Wikipedia links first and other material following on.

As for striking the Google jackpot, it's not a numbers game. Those articles that get linked and relinked all over the place do so for a reason: Users choose to share them. Thus they find them interesting and worth talking about. Thus they must be doing something right.

"This is my point, the link economy isn't as Utopian as you believe it is. It's just sheer numbers (aka quantity). The more content you pump out, the better chance you have of big page views. This is what DM is doing, on a massive scale."

It's really not just a numbers game. Like I said, Themestream and Knol have both tried the same thing before and both are great big failures. A quality blog spreading value and ideas can have hundreds of times more traffic even with much fewer posts than a blog posting tens of thousands of times a year. Quality breeds respect, which breeds community, which in turn breeds re-sharing among users. That's why RWW gets so many readers.

Just making a volume play is a large waste of time.

Search is the v8 engine of the internet. To me it seems as if it has served it purpose and is now quickly becoming obsolete.

Considering the new movement to social search and referral marketing, I would expect some major changes are coming soon.

You definitely opened my eyes on the content farms. I agree that premium content will take its place online as a result of this wholesale manipulation of the search engines. I for one have no problem paying for reliable information sources.

Thanks for beginning this much needed conversation.

I hate to sound cynical but I question if what you and I would consider to be "low quality" content would be the same as what the masses consider "low quality". It may be that "content farm" content fills a needed niche. That said, it irks me as it does make it harder for me to find valuable content. Not only does it litter my search results but clutters my twitter stream as well.

Seems that it is rare that this content would go viral, although I am sure that some does, and most will remain part of the long tail of content. The rare pieces that do go viral do so on the social web. "Content Farms" bank on the fact that people who share links gain popularity though the quantity of links shared not their quality. From a social media standpoint, it is our responsibility as curators of content to be selective over the links we choose to share, but to do so we must first be able to identify quality and there lies the rub.

Thanks for the Quality that RRW puts out there on a regular basis.

Andrew Mueller
@andrewmueller
Mueller & Co

I'm erring to the view point of Tadhg. Regardless of any specific example, I think overall the best quality content will attract the most good quality links. A link to a piece of content from some random blog with no authority of it's own will not do much for a piece of DM content. But a link from an authoritative source like RWW to a genuinely good article or piece of content will ensure that the better quality content rises to the top more often than not.

Simple fact is, to rank well and drive traffic from Google for popular queries with lots of volume you need to have lots of good quality links and low quality content generally won't cut it. Not all DM content is necessarily bad of course (each piece survives on it's own merit), but if it isn't genuinely useful it simply won't attract enough of the good links to do well in search results. It might find some other social trajectory to drive traffic (like Twitter or Facebook), but it won't do well in Google, atleast not for any popular phrases.

DM will of course do everything they can to generate links and buzz for their content with social media (blah blah blah), but overall I reckon Google does a stand up job of rewarding the best content with traffic.

Where I expect DM does well is in the longtail of search queries...producing as much content as they do they can drive traffic from all those niche queries which don't have much demand (3-4 word phrases and real niche terms etc) but in aggregate still provide a lot of volume. Because the phrases are less popular they have less competition in the way of other good quality pages and so are easier to rank for.

The other thing I wonder about is the quantity of content in the overall scheme of things. Google indexes what, a 100 Billion+ pages of content already and that number is growing really fast. There's probably 100's, if not 1000's of new sites going online everyday each with 1000's of new pages of content. Is DM's content really going to pollute the pool? Don't get me wrong, I'm not an advocate from creating loads of crappy content, but I wonder if it is possible that we are overstating the significance of the content being produced by DM et al.

Great article.

From a business perspective...

In my opinion, in 2010 businesses are going to have to think like publishers and as their own media source.

But besides the obvious (on paper at least) of creating quality content, there are other opportunities including:

-Being a "Content DJ" and finding the absolute best content and delivering to your audience in an interesting way (Text, Audio, Video with a twist)

-If you don't want to produce content or DJ it, then by all means sponsor someone that does and associate your brand with it.

While low quality content is not good for anyone, I still have belief the best always rises to the top. Even with crazy search engines and other online goodies, in the end we are all humans and use our judgment and trust.

It's relatively easy to cheaply generate links that validate your content. Sure, the content has to be okay, but at present the algorithms weight links far more, and so a couple of PR2/3 links to a piece of long-tail content means a lot.

The number of splogs that generate these types of links, along with software that automates link dropping on forums has accelerated in 2009 and should continue to do so in 2010 until Google decides that they aren't a signal of trust.

That's the problem - good content often gets buried because more and more mediocre content has a built in link strategy. Not to mention, many of these sites now get links from sister-sites or parent companies. A link from a PR6/7/8 early on makes it difficult for others to contend. I see this again and again.

However, Google should fix this in 2010. They do want an accurate reflection of trust and authority on their search results, so I'd be surprised if they didn't take aim at these links and create havoc in the SEO community.

This is an interesting point and one that I touched on briefly in my previous comment, but you hit the nail on the head.

What will be an interesting dimension on this will how it integrates into Real-Time SE strategies and discovery.

In my take, Search Engines will need to take into account a "historical quality score" for the content provider, not just the content itself.

Those with a higher historical quality score will more than likely take a higher rank than "carpet bombers" like Demand Media.

Absolutely, but I wouldn't expect anything less tbh. There will *always* be something that turns up to threaten whatever business you have. Even Google has to keep on their toes, as I noted in the post.

What I personally believe will be the natural fall-out of uninspired content churned out to meet a short-term demand is that the line which demarcates genuinely USEFUL information from practically worthless (until processed) raw data will shift even more towards one side of the spectrum.

Which will very possibly make it highly profitable for those who focus on creating valuable, reliable and inspired content - though in the short term, they'll likely take a hit, and will need to have a strategy allowing them to plod on beyond the 'dip'.

At that point, even search engines and information locating services will be forced to focus on the 'value' rather than just 'volume' - and potentially this will open up the SE wars on a new dimension too, one more interesting and uncertain than we can foresee just now!

It's been an continual battle for years...
Think about these industries and their disrupter's:

Painting (fine arts) -> Photography
Dining -> fast food
Print Media -> Web

However, in all these items, there's a place for the original. Print Media is the only one in question, but at the same time, I do believe there will be a place when it's all sorted out. It's just going to be extremely painful to get there.

I do believe viewers will begin to recognize the "content farms" as having little to no value once they begin to be more and more prevalent.

It's already started... just look at About.com, answers.com, or even articles.com. as soon as I hit those sites, I bounce because I know it will have little to no value.

I do have to say, it's interesting how the tables have turned on blogs. For years, they've been on the offensive taking market share from traditional print media. Now, there's something that is threating this establishment as well.

The interesting part will be to see how we react to it. Hopefully, the industry has learned a thing or two from the previous content war and not stick their heads in the sand.

The reality, however, is unfortunately different. Other websites can and do link to poor quality content. Why? Often because they can't find any better content. Or maybe because the poor quality content was the first article about a certain topic and therefore gained early traction (important when building page rank).

I see what you're saying re link economy, but I've seen far too many instances of page 1 of a Google search for a popular term being littered with what I would consider poor quality blogs. Think about it, these blogs and sites like DM pump out *thousands* of new pieces of content each day. The sad fact is that statistically a percentage of those will in some way go viral or simply strike the Google jackpot and become a big page view generator.

This is my point, the link economy isn't as Utopian as you believe it is. It's just sheer numbers (aka quantity). The more content you pump out, the better chance you have of big page views. This is what DM is doing, on a massive scale.

Hence, poor content becomes de-prioritised in rank. And, hence, the good stuff comes to the top. This is why even Google's own content farm, Knol, has largely failed. It is also why other farms like Themestream, Everything2 and so on have also largely failed.

It's also why Wikipedia articles now show on nearly every Google search you do. Wikipedia is effectively a content farm too, but with a difference. That difference is its users ability to re-edit the poor content out and replace it with better content, with the net result being better articles that more people link to.

"Better" in this instance means "More specific to user's needs", not better writing or more famous or whatever. Some of the articles produced by content farms will indeed fit that bill. And so they will rise up the ranks as they will be appropriate. Not every Wikipedia page is great, so, unsurprisingly, those pages don't feature that much in searches either. So the system protects itself.

Your post reminds me of the agonising over blogging back in the day. A billion-blog future was supposed to spawn some sort of doomsday of poor search and an inaccessible web, and that hasn't happened. The link economy functioned to stream out the rubbish blogs, and content farms are no different. You don't magically gain authority just by posting lots of poor quality articles around in the hope they'll go "viral", which is what the Demand strategy seems to be: You do it by writing better, more interesting, more remarkable content.

It seems pretty straightforward to recognize that you have created a derivative work that includes your text and somebody else's picture.

If a photographer combined your text with a photo he took and sold it to CNET -- I'm pretty sure you'd figure out that this is a problem.

My understanding of the licensing agreement is "Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes." I got this information by clicking on the attribution. Your site is a commercial site that makes money. Therefore, you actually don't have the rights to use this photo.

It does, but note that I've never claimed that Demand Media is spam or garbage content. It's always above board and usually 'good enough' from quality perspective. So to be fair, Google has no real reason to penalize it.

My point is more that there are other, much better sources of content for most of the topics DM covers - and the danger is that those are getting harder and harder to discover due to the sheer quantity of content DM and others pump out. This has always been an issue, ever since blogs started to compete with each other on quantity. But now it's *much* more of a problem, due to the scale DM and its ilk operate at.

The problem here is that measuring trust and authority is getting more difficult. Way back when, the algorithm could use far more on-page factors (Title, Keywords, Headers, Text etc.) to make a determination of what was worthy.

But smart SEO caught up and suddenly many of those on-page factors weren't good indicators of quality. Heck, SEO made meta keywords obsolete!

The new content farms take advantage of on-page factors but have also zeroed in on off-page factors: links. Through a number of mechanisms these highly targeted pieces of content also garner a lot of links.

Links have been the best way for Google to identify trust and authority. But the link economy is transforming ... quickly.

Whether it's those who have a built in cross-link platform (Demand Media, AOL) or any site who can hire an offshore firm to do variants of link astroturfing, the value of links as a measure of trust and authority is at risk.

I believe neutralizing the link dilution will be a major issue for Google in 2010. The introduction of SearchWiki, their measurement of short-clicks versus long-clicks, the new domain/brand SERP listing, snippet links, and use of breadcrumbs all point to a gathering movement to help determine quality without such a reliance on an ever diluted link ecosystem.

Your fast food analogy can be taken to that same level, if people eat it, then the business should keep making cheap food, cause people eat it. If they are generating revenue with ads on their low quality site, people are using the service.

I've never been a fan of "buyer beware". That's what these guys are offering. Their posts beat out reputable/higher quality sites so it's up to the searcher to take the extra effort to find the quality sites.

I personally have found the best resource through social networking. I've worked my way up the food chain to find the source. See a RT or link to a site with the original article? RSS or follow them on twitter. I also bookmark them. Now I know where to get answer for what I need.

Took me a lot longer then typing "Web design" and hoping for the best. But then again I don't eat fast food, except only in the most dire circumstances.

If your motives were pure and you wanted to save the quality of content online - then why use a photo for this article and not give one cent to the photographer ('Darin') for the use of his photo. That action and the creation of Flickr and Creative Commons - not to mention sites that just steal photos - have drastically brought down the quality of photography and killed opportunities for true photojournalists. At least Aol is offering to pay for their photos.

I apologize in advance in my assumption about the photo was inaccurate.

I happen to find a lot of quality content via the Facebook stream, which is unfortunately off-limits for Google.

But I'm not sure it necessarily threatens blogs - most bloggers are establishing themselves with niche content (which can be covered), and also a personal brand, which can't. It may allow for people to fake their content whilst also networking, but that can lead to embarrassment later on.

The big threat is to traditional media companies - I spent almost a decade working for a very large magazine publisher in the UK, and it's hard to see how they could alter their current business structure quickly enough to compete with the content farms, or to effectively target niches. They're caught in the middle, with paywalls as their main hope - but I'm not convinced that the paywall option will work quite as they assume...

I for one am ecstatic that the problem exists and can quickly think of three solutions to improve it. And I did not even try that hard, which means there are many more solutions to solve this available. We are starting to see some of this need, say filters, being filled via friend-authority-respect rating systems.

The fact that such solutions help to break through the FUD "fog" of the internet cloud like a hot knife through butter is a great thing as well. Just because a company can pay/influence hundreds to spin their message will not matter in the future as those hundreds of messages will not be able to prevent the cream of the messages from rising to the top. These solutions will ensure that the minority message, rated higher by their friend-authority-respect rating will not be held down by the deluge of dubious, low value content from anyone, even demand media.

I hope I will be referencing this article in the future, with a link to a solution that solves part of this problem. Each part of the solution is yet another business opportunity! Time will tell the tale as it always does. Thanks for the article and thoughts.

Should bloggers worry? Quite the opposite. With RSS feeds and quality (if not quantity) content, value-adding bloggers, like better authors, will get more notice, more acclaim and more eyeballs.

find me at: http://alexkessinger.net

Today the bar has been raised a little but we are still seeing similar attempts as your article describes nicely.

Mark, I wasn't at any stage saying it was a zero sum game. Demand Media and other farms will continue to thrive, but I'd like to see better ways for readers to find quality content. Or maybe, as I noted, finding isn't the answer - but subscribing is.

This influx of low quality content(About.com anyone?) topping search engine results makes people more likely to use services like Digg or maybe Twitter to see what people are buzzing about.

Google IS AWARE of this, hence their recent implementation of social media buzz into search results.