Polluting the Internet
So, here’s how you do it: you analyze what people are searching for online (e.g. “what’s the best lure for muskie fishing?”). Then you analyze how crowded the ad space is for that search by examining how many companies are paying for the ads to appear for the combination of these words: muskie+fishing+lure. You repeat this process many times and select the searches that are likely to be most profitable over a long period of time.
Then you contract cheap laborers to make that content.
You put it on the internet at the rate of 4000 articles and videos per day.
You generate an inordinate quantity of soulless “content” produced by people with no interest in the topic.
You pollute the internet (and make a lot of money).
The full story, profiling Demand Media, is very interesting.
Comments
Dan McKeown
That was a very fascinating, but sort of scary article. The comments were actually relatively thought provoking as well. Relative to most other comments on most other blogs or websites, that is.
Alexander Micek
Funny you mention that, Dan. I’ve noticed longer articles tend to have better comments — the sheer amount of prose seems to keep many mindless commenters from making it to the end of the article. Incidentally, a common strategy for keeping the quality of discourse on a website high: reduce the image count. This attracts people willing to read and think rather than scan and react. One of the best examples of this is a site called Hacker News.