Tradiaitional media laments that the internet commoditizes their content and they point their finger squarely at google. They also say google is living off of their content and therefore should pay them. While I don’t agree with their second claim, there is a lot of truth to the first one.
Google decides what content is important and what is not. They do this alogrithmically using machine intelligence. Their grading system is the now famous Page Rank. Well since it is computed by machines the system can be gamed. This spawned a whole new industries called search engine optimzation (SEO) and content farms. This has resulted in a whole lot of crap on the internet.
Mike Arrington writes about the end of hand crafted content.
But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly.
On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page.
On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model
.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently.
These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spends time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.
Richard McManus writes about how content farms threaten the media industry and google.
The bottom line is that the quality of content produced by these ‘content farms’ is dubious, which has an impact on both publishers and readers.
So is the Web becoming awash with low-quality content produced by content farms like Demand Media, Answers.com and now AOL? Yes it is.
Given the impact that content farms are having right now, how can producers of ‘quality’ content survive?
Chris Ahearn from Thomson Reuters claims that journalism will “do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive.” Ahearn notes that Reuters makes the “vast majority of its revenues” from subscription-based business models targeted to “vertical and niche markets.” Plus Reuters, he says, provides “valuable services - not just content.”
Right now ‘quantity’ still rules on the Web, ‘quality’ is hard to find. Perhaps that’s why Reuters is betting on the subscription model - it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. I think there’s something to that, which if true implies that Google will become less relevant in the future. Should Google be worried about that? Yes; and they are.
I can only hope that Google and other search engines find betters ways to surface quality content, for its own sake as well as ours. Because right now Google is being infiltrated on a vast scale by content farms.