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The Web has always rewarded quantity more than quality, but over 2010 this truism became even more pronounced with the growth of Content Farms. These are companies which create thousands of pieces of content per day. Much of it is in the form of how-to articles and is often referred to as "evergreen" informational content, because it's relevant for much longer than news.

By the end of last year, two of these content farms - Demand Media and Answers.com - were firmly established inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S. as measured by comScore. This year, Demand Media filed for IPO and two big Internet portals - AOL and Yahoo! - joined the trend. Let's take a look back on the year of the Content Farm and their collective impact in the Web.

Content farms have been in the spotlight over the past year. They're companies that generate hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content on a daily basis. Much of their traffic comes from Google search, so the aim of content farms is to rake in the money with online advertising. Demand Media has been the most ambitious of these companies, but even the big portals are doing it nowadays. Yahoo! recently acquired Associated Content and AOL launched an initiative earlier this year disingeniously called Seed.

In our content farms coverage so far, we've focused mostly on textual content farms. But video may well be the next frontier. A startup called Howcast specializes in mass production of video content.

One of the most impressive benefits of the real-time Web is its ability to allow people to instantly collaborate on massive global projects from the comfort of their own home. Between editing articles on Wikipedia and helping rescuers locate evidence of a downed aircraft in dense woodland areas, there is no shortage of ways to collaborate on the Web. It is in this spirit of crowdsourcing that YouTube is launching a new project, "Life in a Day," which it hopes will tell the story of a single day on Earth.

When we announced the launch of Hulu Plus earlier this week, one of the comments we received touched on an issue that many overlook when considering online video. While others argued dollars and cents, one lone commenter pondered whether Hulu would be providing captions on its videos. YouTube, the largest provider of online video content, already provides automatic captioning services, but these are far from perfect. On Wednesday, however, YouTube announced that it has partnered with the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) to certify "YouTube Ready" captioning services.

Numbers released from comScore today show that U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos online in the month of May, up from just over 30 billion in April. Hulu served up nearly 1.2 billion videos last month, nearly 3.5% of the overall market, while Google remained supreme, accounting for 43% of the market - a whopping 14.6 billion videos - with its powerhouse property, YouTube. Still, Hulu, a place where many watch full episodes of network television, is slowly inching from the pack, and Fox Interactive Media, sitting near the bottom of comScore's rankings, wants a piece of the action. They're target? Mobile.

On the heels of a report which found that online ad revenues will likely surpass those of print ads in the next year, television networks are poised to increase the number of ads run during episodes of shows viewed online. Will Richmond of VideoNuze reports that ABC intends to double the amount of advertisements displayed when viewers watch episodes of ABC shows on the network's website after implementing a similar policy for its iPad app.

Our good friend Steve Garfield is a terrific fellow and also happens to be one of the Web's first video bloggers. As part of a series called The New Rules of Social Media, he's just published a book that lays out a complete roadmap for online video success.

Essentially, Get Seen is a comprehensive field guide for how to produce, upload, distribute and publicize online video content.

Just to put the numbers into perspective, with its recent earnings from entering the online movie rental business, YouTube couldn't even afford one minimum-wage, full-time employee. But it's not a bad start, nonetheless, and the best news may be for the filmmakers themselves.

When YouTube announced the move two weeks ago, we mused over whether or not people would be willing to pay for content, as is always the question. For a relatively quick, quiet test campaign, we would venture that YouTube certainly outpaced Newsday, with its 35 online subscribers.

YouTube just launched a streamlined video player and redesigned video pages. The new video pages give YouTube a more minimalist and streamlined look, with a stronger focus on the video. For now, these new features are opt-in only. It is not clear when Google plans to make this new design the default theme for YouTube.

The good folks at UK open government consultancy Delib have just released a short documentary about the United States' first year since President Obama's Open Government memorandum.

The documentary was shot by Delib founder Chris Quigley over two months last year, both on location in Washington DC and via Skype.