A few weeks ago, MediaShift published an excellent package of articles about content farms. Content farms are internet publishing businesses that bet the sheer volume of content—usually, but not always built algorithmically around web search—they produce will lead to profitability. In “Your Guide to Next Generation ‘Content Farms,’” Davis Shaver cites Richard Rosnblatt’s, Demand Media’s chief executive, belief that “algorithmically-generated assignments could generate 4.9 times the revenue of traditional editor-generated ideas.”
AOL has formed content farms for text and photos (Seed) and video (StudioNow). Both use demand/search data to algorithmically-generate assignments for more than 40,000 content creators. AOL’s Patch—it’s hyperlocal news offering—also is a content farm, with content being fed predominantly from Seed freelancers and other freelancers.
Demand Media’s 10,000 content creators produce 6,000 pieces of written and video content each day. Potential article titles are generated algorithmically and reviewed by proofers who then release them as assignments up for grabs to Demand Media’s freelancers.
Examiner.com’s 42,000 freelancers produce more than 90,000 pieces of content each month for the website’s 13 million monthly users. Freelancers come up with their own story ideas—no search/demand algorithm is used. The website’s content is geo-targeted to the user’s location—one of 250 American or Canadian cities. Or rather, the user’s internet service provider’s location. I live in Saint Paul, but my service provider is in Minneapolis, so all of the geo-targeted content I receive is for the wrong city. Recently, Examiner.com relaunched using Drupal 7.
Yahoo has always produced content for the web—much of it high quality—but jumped on the content farm bandwagon last spring when it bought Associated Content (380,000 freelancers) for more than US$100 million. It remains to be seen if Yahoo’s 122 million users each month will stay around for farmed content. Shaver reports that Associated Content’s editorial staff review more than 50,000 freelance submissions each month against an algorithm that predicts profitable assignments.
In the second piece in the series, “Writers Explain What It’s Like Toiling on the Content Farm,” Corbin Hiar interviews content farmers, some of whom are professional journalists who requested anonymity. “I was completely aware that I was writing crap,” one unnamed source, a working journalist, told Hiar. “I was like, ‘I hope to God people don’t read my advice on how to make gin at home because they’ll probably poison themselves.’”
Uninterested in bylines, these moonlighting pros tend to use pseudonyms or write uncredited pieces. But Hiar cites sources as revealing that Demand Media pays only US$15 or so per published piece, more than most of the other content farms (Associated Content pays as little as US$0.05 per piece; Seed writers create everything on spec, although Seed staff editors accept pitches and make assignments). One writer, “Christopher,” tells Hiar that he “forces himself to pump out three pieces per hour for three hours a day.”
Other articles in the series include Corbin Hiar’s “Writers Talk About Working the Hyper-Local Beat,” Craig Silverman’s “How Content Farms Train Their Writers to Write for the Web,” Corbin Hiar’s “Writers Talk About Working the Hyper-Local Beat,” Mark Glaser’s podcast, “The Problem with Content Farms” (.mp3; 4:02), and Mark Glaser’s “Beyond Content Farms” (flash or .mp4 video; 21:52).
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