Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried
I've been writing a lot about so-called 'content farms' in recent months - companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web. Both of those two companies are now firmly inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S., on a par with the likes of Apple and AOL.
Big media, blogs and Google are all beginning to take notice.
Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, recently published an article on how journalism can survive in the Internet age. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington also riffs on this theme, mentioning AOL's "Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media" and quoting a Wired piece on Demand Media from October.
I started my analysis of Demand Media in this August post. I wrote then that Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software and make lots of money through ads. Demand Media has been heavily funded to carry out that mission, to the tune of $355 million. In short, it's a well-funded, well-oiled page view generating machine.
In November I explored more about how Demand Media produces 4,000 pieces of content a day, based on an interview I did with the founders in September. I followed up by asking: is ad-driven content crossing a line?
Low Quality, High Impact
The bottom line is that the quality of content produced by these 'content farms' is dubious, which has an impact on both publishers and readers.
Last week I analyzed the way wikiHow produces its content - its users do all of the writing and editing for free, via a Wikipedia-like platform. There was evidence that wikiHow's model is producing better content than its Demand Media counterpart for how-to articles, eHow. More worrying though is that Demand Media is producing thousands of these types of articles a day.
So is the Web becoming awash with low-quality content produced by content farms like Demand Media, Answers.com and now AOL? Yes it is.
From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn't go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it "lacks soul," it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington's analogy with fast food is apt - it is content produced quickly and made to order.
Can Quality Survive?
Given the impact that content farms are having right now, how can producers of 'quality' content survive?
Chris Ahearn from Thomson Reuters claims that journalism will "do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive." Ahearn notes that Reuters makes the "vast majority of its revenues" from subscription-based business models targeted to "vertical and niche markets." Plus Reuters, he says, provides "valuable services - not just content."
Ahearn also implies that syndication technologies, like Reuters' semantic analysis platform Open Calais, will lead to a new kind of "B2B content network" - where content creators and publishers can easily collaborate and make money together.
Google Needs to Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
In my view both writers and readers of content will need to work harder to get quality content. I know I'd rather read an article by The Economist on any given topic, than one generated by Demand Media. But we, as readers, need more help from Google and the other search engines.
Right now 'quantity' still rules on the Web, 'quality' is hard to find. Perhaps that's why Reuters is betting on the subscription model - it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. I think there's something to that, which if true implies that Google will become less relevant in the future. Should Google be worried about that? Yes; and they are.
I can only hope that Google and other search engines find betters ways to surface quality content, for its own sake as well as ours. Because right now Google is being infiltrated on a vast scale by content farms.
If you thought it was bad enough that many professional blogs pump out 30 posts a day, often regurgitations of press releases or quick write-ups of "news" such as Twitter being down for a few minutes (note the irony of that tweet), this new type of Google gaming is on a far bigger scale.
What Demand Media, Answers.com and AOL are doing is having a much greater impact on the quality and findability of content on the Web.
See also:
- Demand Media Is a Page View Generating Machine - And it's Working
- Answers.com: 31 Million Copied and Pasted Web Pages Can't Go Wrong
- The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media
- How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day
- Ad-Driven Content - Is it Crossing The Line?
Photo credit: ~Darin~
See also: How Google Can Combat Content Farms (follow-up to this post)
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I don't believe it is this Dooms Day scenario at all. This is is part of the evolution of the web.
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.
Not sure I understand the point of this article. The Web isn't some zero sum game in which Demand Media will fill up all the space. I like the "fast food" analogy, but take it further. Just because 3/5 (or whatever) hamburgers bought in the U.S. doesn't mean that there isn't room for Carl's Jr., and even room for In N Out, and it also doesn't mean that gourmet chef's aren't selling $15 and even $25 hamburgers at their restaurants. True, it's harder to find the gourmet stuff, or the local joint without a big brand name, but people do find it. Maybe Google is like driving around nearly aimlessly looking for a hamburger - you're going to go to McDonald's a lot. But what if there's a niche for a search engine that's more like the back of New York magazine - accumulating and rating restaurants. Maybe the latter looks more like Yelp or TravelAdvisor, right? So, I think Demand Media is a great business model. But it's not the only one that can survive.
Jason, that is a great point and complements my own: that we need better tools for finding quality. I guess I think Google needs to do more than just slap some Twitter results at the top of page 1 of a search result. I think they *will*, it's just a question of how fast they evolve. Because these content farms are pumping out content thick and fast.
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.
Richard - Seems like a call for curated + intelligence "search" engines that can't easily be linkbaited; could also involve organic search like Twitter.
Quality has always been an issue on the internet. It seems that the pattern is a huge onrush of information followed by a winnowing period where the chaff is separated from the wheat. I do this on Twitter. I follow a group of users and then pare them down, based on quality. Then I add another group and pare them down. For the same reason (quality), I don't always search with Google anymore. I find websites that publish high-quality content about given topic areas, and then I go back to them and do internal searches for what I need, rather than just using Google, which is hit-or-miss. The wider Google casts its net - and now I'm thinking specifically of Twitter - the more watered-down it becomes in terms of quality. A higher quantity of hits does not always equate to better-quality information, and Google must find a way to work around this. Perhaps a user rating system for quality (click on a linear scale or something) could be factored in.
Google constantly weights it’s search algorithms to demerit crap sites.
The web is one huge advertising-driven medium. The crying about content farming, to me at least, is more it eating into other's profits. Sure it may be lower quality content, but with clicks equaling cash content really doesn't matter. It's like porn, it's all the same content to one degree or another.
Nice piece, Richard, and I agree with you 100%. A few years back, a company called GeoSign went up to $160M in revenue before being shut down by Google overnight. They were creating 1000's of pages arbitraging the cost of page creation against expected ad revenues (from Google mostly). Needless to say, their content was very thin.
Today the bar has been raised a little but we are still seeing similar attempts as your article describes nicely.
If you define google as just search, sure you are right, they aren't ready for subscriptions, but google is more then search. When it comes to subscribing to content they have google reader. I use google reader to do exactly as you say, subscribe to "authoritative" sources. I also have an extensive network of people who I follow on google reader, I like to see what they are seeing and think is cool. My bet is that google can leverage sharing networks like this to determine where the quality is. They may also be able to leverage it for search.
find me at: http://alexkessinger.net
No comparison between a place like Demand and WikiAnswers (I don't know about Answers.com). Demand employs copyeditors who are also fact checkers, and Demand staffers regularly review the work of the copyeditors to ensure that articles meet a wide swath of standards. Do any other of these content mills provide the same attempts at quality control? Demand is not going to replace the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in an age when journalists/editors/writers are losing jobs left and right, Demand is paying people. Lots of them. How much are those WikiAnswer writers making? And who is checking to see if their information is correct?
Here's the thing: It's just like any other product marketing. If the product offers less value (i.e., lower content quality in this case), consumers will learn to ignore it. Once the brand occupies a position of "low-quality" producers, discriminating shoppers will increasingly ignore it, no matter how high it appears on a Google search.
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.
Great article which points out a business need and a huge opportunity for the right solution to fill the space.
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.
I totally agree that the content farm approach is one that several companies are using successfully - indeed, it's one that's been offered for a while with a focus on SEO, with services offering a set number of 'unique' stories for sites produced by battery farm writers...
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...
Content farming is a risk to Google because the distinction between top quality and mass-produced, mass-linked content can be entirely opaque to Page Rank. Its especially true when the content is farmed by players with substantial distribution muscle themselves such as Aol and Demand Media.
I happen to find a lot of quality content via the Facebook stream, which is unfortunately off-limits for Google.
I have so much respect for you and your column. But, I agree with the earlier person - what's the point of this article?
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 can understand the concern expressed in the article. But what is the solution? One could argue that the content farms are providing exactly what people want. Easy tidbits of information.
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.
Disappointed, your assumption is indeed inaccurate. That photo is Creative Commons attribution: "to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work". I linked to it and we're not making money off of it, so it's non-commercial.
This is absolutely a problem that Google is facing in 2010. They're already talking about trust and authority as being the guiding principles for quality content.
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.
Michael, to your point (comment #6): "Google constantly weights it’s search algorithms to demerit crap sites."
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.
As I said, I respect you and will continue to read RWW. And, I am also not a lawyer but a photographer (hence why this issue is important to me).
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.
J. Jones, I agree it's a contentious point. My understanding was that because we're not making money from that photo, i.e. we're not using it for commercial purposes, then we're ok to use it. I may be wrong though, I'm (thankfully) not a lawyer.
Do you think the content you write makes money for you? Of course you do -- because there are ads ALL OVER THE PAGE.
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.
Sometimes I get tired of link this, link that. How about just writing decent content? I am not exactly the best out there, but I love writing and I blog because I love writing about many different topics. I have plugged away with okay results over 3 years, but not nearly as good results I think I should have. Mostly, just because I haven't spent my life doing link building with companies, and I even shunned some social media for a while. I just write. I honestly the ad market online will eventually get over saturated and if every second blog gets millions of hits because of links -- this does not equal conversions. If Vogue sells ads, they are targetting an audience. It really at this point has little to do with how many people,. but the quality of the people. I agree with Rupert Murdoch in his assesment that there is not enough add dollars to go around. Take my site even, I had 4000 views for one of my ads - with 4 click throughs! That is a terrible number. People are ignoring ads now for the most part and I think conversion is going to matter in th end the most and "conversion" has to do with quality readers -- not just numbers.
Google is more than search---
Google needs time to improve itself in searching--
After all, it tries ways to meet the quality! and more than this
No. I don't buy into this at all, because the thing about poor content is that nobody links to it. Google search functions on number of links to establish authority.
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.
Sometimes you do have to eat in the car, but gourmet stories, nicely plated, in a lovely setting, are worth $15 bucks.
Tadhg, that's certainly the theory: "You do it by writing better, more interesting, more remarkable content."
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.
Faster, Cheaper, Strength in Numbers
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.
When it comes to 'content' on the Web, there has always been a continuum between 'data' and 'information'. Raw data on the Web has always been humungous. Distilled into valuable information, though, the quantum is smaller - and thanks to 'content farms', is becoming even more so.
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!
Troy, re: "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."
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.
@Dr. Mani
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.
Richard has it right when he says the link economy isn't Utopian. In fact, it's getting downright Dystopian.
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.
Richard -
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.
Great post Richard, this is a super interesting topic.
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.
Richard,
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
Richard, great article. I was just complaining today as to how hard its becoming once again to find anything beyond thinly veiled affiliate sites and ad farms. Heck, even the search engines are jammed full of ads above the fold.
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.
Richard,
"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.
CPM, an antiquated measure that started when most content was good enough is responsible for this frenzy of content creation. These content farms are living by it.
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.
It's not a quality problem, it's a filtering problem - it's not the first, won't be the last.
Personally I think search has too great an importance - and I can see it losing ground to p2p recommendation.
This is a very interesting topic, I believe that it is very difficult for the quality to survive. There is lot of competition and quality and quantity both to go hand in hand is really difficult.
I actually will not keep reading you because you didn't take that photo down.
Isn't this what mahalo is doing? Content aimed at ads and search terms?
Right on. In the past 4 month we just doubled visitors on one of our community project because we were investing a lot into original content. Other similar copy-paste projects are loosing loyal readers...
Excellent and (some) intelligent comments.Clearly an issue that has been around for a long time although we are in real danger of getting to a point where spam content generators are winning the battle. I like that Mike Arrington concept of McDonalds content.
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/
I'm also disappointed. To say that your use of Darin's photo on a web page filled with ads is non-commercial is patently ridiculous. You don't need to be a lawyer to cash the checks you get; you DO need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of copyright law to be able to write intelligently about the technology issues you write so well about, so I can only assume lameness.
The content like demand media...hmmm...if am looking for real blogger blogging on such site then hubpages is the ideal..
The wider topic of article marketing and it's effect on search and specifically Google is about to get very interesting with the war that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has picked. On the one hand he has opened up a home front against the BBC (nothing new there he has hated the BBC ever since he first got into publishing), but on the International front he is picking a fight with Google. Links from relevant accredited online publications have always been the best kind to have for search engine optimisation and conceivably all these links could vanish overnight behind a paywall.
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.
i remember growing up in nyc where many of us viewed the post and the daily news as the near tabloid-like newspapers, while the ny times was the source of authoritative high quality reporting. having said that, the post & the daily news appealed to a broad constituency that didn't want the deep analysis or higher level of quality reporting.
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.
This strikes me as comparable to a situation where companies are allowed to put up a myriad of billboards in front of Mount Rushmore about Mount Rushmore - complete with high-res photos. Would people driving by, stop, get out of their cars, and look behind the billboards to see the original? On an inclement day, most probably would not. This doesn't make the situation right or proper.
Content junk farms could be shut down (or made ineffective) if there was a better way to detect the by-and-large plagarized content from good web sources.
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?
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