Farm Villains

Scott Hardie | June 19, 2011
A disgruntled former writer for AOL's content farm complains about his experience. If the article doesn't make it clear, one of the rising business models on the web is to generate massive amounts of text content with highly desirable word combinations in order to attract clicks, which drive up ad impressions, which generates revenue.

The first thing is, it doesn't generate much revenue, which is why companies like Demand Media have found limited success only by becoming as efficient as possible: A computer algorithm spits out suggested titles like "seven vacation ideas in Philadelphia" or "eight tips for getting in shape this summer" and freelancers are paid a few dollars to crank out a few paragraphs matching the headline. That AOL actually pays their writers $35,000 per year to do basically the same thing does not seem like a profitable model.

The second thing is, of course this practice is scuzzy. The author is sincerely surprised? Nobody, except apparently Alec Baldwin, pays more than a few seconds' attention to articles like these on the Internet. They have all of the depth of a 140-character tweet, stretched out to several paragraphs. The companies generating them as mechanically and rapidly as possible do not care about readers, so they do not care about writers. This disgruntled writer seems to be a nice guy, but he's in the wrong field if he expects to be treated with any more respect than a cog in a machine.

None of this is likely to matter for long anyway. Just as Google took their eyes off the ball (quality search results) and allowed companies to game the system by authoring enormous quantities of pseudo-content, they are beginning a long-term plan to revise their system so that they can get back to what used to be their core strength, returning helpful results at the top and pushing unhelpful clutter aside. Most other search engines do exactly what Google does. If this doesn't spell the eventual end of content farms, their own faulty accounting practices will.

Scott Hardie | June 20, 2011
On the other hand, there's quick and easy money to be made in certain hot but untapped keywords. Hearing so much about Falling Skies, I wondered if TNT offered the episodes for viewing online, but I found the Flash-heavy official site unnavigable. So I searched for "watch falling skies online" and found a crazy number of quickie web sites set up for exactly that phrase, all of which have scarcely any actual content but lots and lots of ads. Google has their work cut out for them.