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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.

Yesterday we wrote about how Demand Media produces 4,000 new pieces of content every day - and whether it can sustain quality at that scale. There was vigorous discussion about the quality issue in the comments, including from some of Demand Media's thousands of freelance writers.

In this follow-up post, we look at the type of content that Demand Media outputs. It turns out that much of it is driven by advertising demand. Again we feel compelled to ask: is this good or bad for the Web's future?

In August we reviewed Demand Media, one of the largest producers of content on the Web today. Wired Magazine recently compared Demand Media's content business to Henry Ford's production line for cars. Demand Media currently produces 4,000 new pieces of content a day. What's more, it's increasingly syndicating this content to media sites outside of its own network of vertical websites. In other words, Demand Media is becoming a very large content production factory for third party sites such as Yahoo.

In this follow-up post, we dive deeper into Demand Media's content production model - and ask questions about the quality of the output.

Two companies that produce massive quantities of new content every day, Answers.com and Demand Media, are rapidly moving up the list of top U.S. web properties, as measured by comScore. Answers.com has risen from #26 to #13 in just two months, and Demand Media has risen from #24 to #15 in the same time period. Answers.com has nearly 38 million pages of content on the Web so far; Demand Media produces 2,000 4,000 new pieces of content a day.

Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web? Will it lead to the same uniformity and lowest common denominator content that afflicts the television industry?

Earlier this week we looked at the top 50 web properties in the U.S., according to comScore, and analyzed the changes over the past year. The top 5 were almost the same, except for the entrance of Facebook at number 5. What really caught our eye though was the progress of several less glamorous brands up the comScore charts. We profiled one of them, Demand Media, yesterday. Today we look at a site that wasn't in the top 50 one year ago but is now ranked #26. The Answers.com site gets over 28 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore.

How has Answers.com achieved this stellar growth? The same way Demand Media has: sheer quantity of content.

UPDATE: Bob Rosenschein, CEO, Answers.com, left a comment on this post with some illuminating data points. He first notes that the majority of page views comes from WikiAnswers.com, which had 22M uniques in July '09 while Answers.com had 10M "with some overlap." What's more, he notes that "the growth in our traffic is almost entirely from our WikiAnswers site."