returned $82.95 in advertising. In big green letters it tells the editor they’ve made $67.95 in profit for the mothership. It’s journalism, commoditized.
So, why this setup? Here’s what one AOL writer—John Biggs—had to say on AOL blog TechCrunch.com:
“There’s no money in shaking the crown of power from a lowly perch. There is money in feeding novel info to a ravenous, neophilic audience.”[35]
They do it because it works! The headlines are irresistible. In doing the research for this chapter alone, I’ve watched a one-and-a-half-minute short film on Lindsay Lohan, seen John Lithgow’s dramatic interpretation of a press release from Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, learned that Shiloh Jolie-Pitt turned five years old, and yes, have seen a lot of pictures and videos of Sarah Palin riding a motorcycle. The age of the oldest female bodybuilder as of this writing, by the way, is 74.
These articles aren’t written by people with a journalism background. They’re written by freelancers— independent contractors—who needn’t be provided any healthcare or retirement benefits. For content farmers, they’re simply credited—about $15 for a written piece of content, $20 for a video—directly to their bank account. Copy editors are paid a remarkable $2.50 per piece of content. Traditional newspapers pay about $300 to a freelance journalist for the same amount of work.
The jobs themselves tend to be no piece of cake. According to former AOL employee Oliver Miller:
“My ‘ideal’ turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen—and this twenty-five minute period included time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing and editing a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn’t matter; or rather, they didn’t matter for my bosses.
I had panic attacks; we all did. My fellow writers would fall asleep, and then wake up in cold sweats. I worked the graveyard shift—11PM to 7 or 8AM or later—but even the AOL slaves who wrote during the day would report the same universal experience. Finally falling asleep after work, they would awake with a jump, certain that they had forgotten something—certain that they hadn’t produced their allotted number of articles every thirty minutes. One night, I awoke out of a dead sleep, and jumped to my computer, and instantly began typing up an article about David Letterman. I kept going for ten minutes, until I realized I had dreamed it all. There was no article to write; I was simply typing up the same meaningless phrases that we all always used: ‘LADY GAGA PANTLESS ON LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN,’ or some such.
Then there was the week where I only slept for about six hours over the course of five days—a week that ended with me being so exhausted that I started having auditory hallucinations, constantly hearing a distant ringing phone that didn’t exist, or an imaginary door slamming in the background.”[36]
Now granted, Miller was still working from the comfort of his house. You can’t compare the job to farming at the physical level—as we’ve noted before, farming tends to be one of the more dangerous professions in America. Mr. Miller isn’t going to lose his life in a tragic blogging accident. But it also doesn’t sound like it was a particularly nice job to have.
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
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
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
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:
