While factory farming dominates agriculture, content farming now dominates our information consumption online. Its industrialization goes far beyond news.
If you’ve ever searched online for how to change the oil in your car, how to iron a shirt, or how to unclog a toilet, chances are you’ve run across a website called eHow.
eHow is owned by another content farm called Demand Media—probably the largest, in terms of workforce, of all content farms. They supply the content to eHow, Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong.com, and Tyra Banks’ typeF.com. Beyond their own sites, Demand Media also provides farmed content to a variety of websites across the Internet. In terms of traffic, Demand Media’s sites receive more unique visits than Fox News’s online presence and the Washington Post combined. It’s the 18th largest property on the Internet. Nearly four million more people online visit a Demand Media website than visit Craigslist in a given month.[37]
Content farms are big businesses. As of this writing, AOL is worth $1.2 billion. Demand Media is worth $663 million. Associated Content—the content farm once billed “The People’s Media Company”—sits as part of Yahoo.com.
Seek and We Shall Profit
Search traffic is the fuel for most of these operations. Content farms have solved a fairly simple math problem. Google and other search engines provide data about the top searches for any given moment. Content farms write articles that then show up in the top results for those searches, and show ads on the pages that those articles are on. Over a short period of time, those pieces of content show enough ads so that they’re profitable. It may cost $15 to make a piece of content, but if every view of the page that it’s on earns you a nickel in advertising revenue, you only need 301 views to start turning a profit.
Google is both an accomplice and a benefactor of content farms. On one hand, Google is a search company. It has a vested interest in making its search experience high quality: if you search for how to change the oil in a 1976 Chevy Nova, Google wants you to get good, clear advice as a result of your search. On the other hand, Google is an advertising company. As of 2011, Google controlled 43.5% of total online advertising spending. Lining the sides of sites like Demand Media are advertisements provided by Google’s ad network: Google’s getting a cut of the site’s advertising revenues, to the tune of millions of dollars.
For now, Google is opting to take the high road and the long-term view. It’s in Google’s interest to give great results to its users—having the Web littered with poor-quality information sources ends up making Google itself less relevant. Thus Google is taking steps to increase incentives to reduce the farming sites’ influence on Google search results.
In early 2011, it released new search technology code-named Panda to curb the effectiveness of content farms. The effect: 17% of Demand Media’s keywords were dropped from the first page of Google’s search results. The New York Times dubbed it “Google’s war on nonsense.”
Panda’s release and deployment is just a battle, not the end of this war. With the money at stake, this is an arms race, not a problem that gets completely solved with some algorithm changes. As Google fine-tunes its algorithm, companies like AOL and Demand Media will find new ways to achieve higher rankings on results pages.
There’s also an ethics problem Google must answer. Google can’t overstep their bounds in the war on nonsense in deciding what is nonsense and what is not. Should Google start providing too much editorial guidance on its top ten results, for instance, it could run into political problems: a search for “climate change” that isn’t seen as fair by either side of that debate may trigger a conversation about regulation. Around Washington there are already whispers of “search neutrality” on this very subject.[38]
There’s another big problem outside of Google’s reach, an untapped and potentially huge market for these content farmers: your local, printed newspaper.
If a traditional freelancer for USA Today makes $300 for the paper, why not take that freelancer and replace him with a content farmer? If you’re a newspaper editor, you may soon be facing that choice. Facing plummeting advertising sales, and the complete gutting of classified ads, traditional media is taking notice: USA Today’s TravelTips, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Home Guides, and the Houston Chronicle’s “Small Business Resource Center” are now powered by the Demand Media content farm. It may be only a matter of time before these articles start making their way off the Web and into your paper, or onto the 11 o’clock news.
Churnalism
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor, in 2008 there were just 69,300 news analysts, correspondents, and reporters in the United States, earning a median average wage of $34,850.[39] The department expects a 4% decline in the sector between 2008 and 2018. The journalist is going the way of the farmer.
The world of public relations is moving in the opposite direction. In 2008, there were over 275,200 public relations specialists in the United States, earning a median annual wage of $51,280. The Bureau expects the field to continue to grow, upwards of 25% between 2008 and 2018.
As a result, our reporters are suffering from information obesity themselves. For every reporter in the United States, there are more than four public relations specialists working hard to get them to write what their bosses want them to say. That’s double what there were in 1970. Journalists are assaulted with press releases stuffed in their mailboxes, polluting their email inboxes, and pouring out of their fax machines, full of pitches, sound bites, and spin.
In an effort to cut costs, journalists often become more filters than reporters, succumbing to the torrents of spin heading their way, and passing on what’s said by the scores of PR consultants. Rather than report the news, they simply copy what’s in a press release and paste it into their stories. It’s a kind of commercially advantageous and permissible plagiarism called churnalism.
In 2009, the independent filmmaker Chris Atkins decided to put this phenomenon to the test. He worked with a small web design firm to set up a fake website for a PR agency, and a fake male cosmetic product, the Penazzle, sold by a fake company: MaleBeautyDirect.com. It’s a temporary tattoo of sorts that sits on a male’s waxed lower abdomen.
Atkins sent press releases out to all the large newsdesks of large newspapers in the UK, and had researchers follow up with calls to each targeted member of the press. The next day, the Sun, the largest newspaper in Britain, carried the story with the headline “Nobbies Dazzlers” with 45% of the text lifted straight from the press release. He demonstrated the same thing repeatedly, with a story of a fake “chastity garter” that secretly texts a boyfriend when she’s cheating on him, and a fake story of how the British Prime Minister’s cat Larry had been stolen from its rightful owner. In every case, the story was carried, without fact checking, and largely copied and pasted into the press.
It’s a widespread problem—and not just the problem of hoaxters either. Researchers at Great Britain’s Cardiff University found that upwards of 60% of press articles and 34% of broadcast stories were the results of churnalism.
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http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/9/comScore_Media_Metrix_Ranks_Top_50_U.S._Web_Properties_for_August_2011