Google Declares War On Content Farms, What's Demand Media To Do?
from the the-markets-are-changing dept
Today we have a guest post from Chas Edwards, Chief Revenue Officer at Pixazza, who's been thinking quite a lot about various content-related business models lately, and wrote the following in response to the recent news of Google's algorithm changeRecently, Google announced changes to the PageRank algorithm that will affect nearly 12% of search results. According to their post at Google’s blog, Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal say the changes are “designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites — sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”
Presumably this will have an enormous effect on content farms such as Demand Media and Yahoo’s Associated Content. So what’s a content farmer to do?
A few days ago I wrote a post expressing my hope that content farms might grow up into something useful and generally less sucky. Maybe I’ve been reading too many happy-ending fairytales to my daughters. But when I pull back from the actual content from Demand or Associated that makes its way to my search results (which is usually quite bad), I see a platform — and platforms, theoretically, are things on which you can build something lame or something good. If the content farmers help individuals with knowledge find questions (search queries) that need answers (topics too niche for large or mid-sized publishers to cover), it seems plausible that some individuals might create useful content.
My argument, though, misses at least two important points, which Glenn Fleishman and Jeff Jarvis helped me think through.
From BuzzMachine:
“Why do people write on Huffington Post? Because they can. Because they give a shit. Because they like the attention and conversation. Because they couldn’t before. Why do they sing their songs on YouTube? Same reasons.”
Jarvis’s argument is: When we’re doing work, we expect to get paid. When we’re doing something for the love of it, we’re motivated by passion and the opportunity to be heard. When we’re doing it for love, in other words, we often create value for free. Quality content is traded for distribution to an audience and for a chance be an authority.
In a Twitter exchange with Glenn Fleishman, he said “The more you spend, the better content you get, up to a point.” His site, Wi-Fi Net News, was one of the first 10 sites that teamed up with Federated Media back in 2005. So my question back to him was: “But what about WFNN in the early days when the money wasn’t great but the content was?”
Aha. It’s about ownership. Glenn is specifically referring to IP ownership (his words, his URL, his business), but there’s a different kind of ownership too — one that Jarvis is getting at. I’m willing to contribute (to the best of my abilities) good content, free of charge, to Twitter, Quora or the Huffington Post even though I don’t own the IP or the business. I’m willing to do that because I do get to own the authority. Those platforms publish my by-line, picture and bio, so if someone out there thinks I’m smart or funny, I own that goodness. I’m not making money, but I get credit. I work hard to create value because, if I’m successful, that content distributed on those platforms polishes my brand and my reputation.
Even if Demand Media keeps most of the money they’re making from their websites, they might dodge the Google bullet if they can improve content quality by giving their contributors a sense of ownership over what they create. And then they marry the handsome prince!
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Filed Under: content farms, search results
Companies: demand media, google
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Get the point
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Chas...you're missing the point.
Why? Because Google eliminated much of the crappy results, which gave more prominence to the good-quality work from...guess where?...eHow!
That's right. You may not like their material, or -- as I suspect -- you just may not be very familiar with it.
But as one of their freelancers, I can tell you that Demand puts a high premium on well-researched, well-written content. Why so many talking heads have this knee-jerk reaction about Demand producing low-quality material is a real mystery. Go read 10 or 20 eHows at random, and then tell us what you think.
Hope to hear back from you with a more informed and informative point of view.
David
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Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
When I look up sail boat racing, I dont want to read a world champion bsers guide to sail boat racing on ehow. I want bob the boat builders blog.
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Re: Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
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Re: Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
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Re: Re: Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
If they brought back the down/up vote and added a feature to "stack" pages that would be wonderful. If you do a search for something and the first three results are the same you could stack them so it will only show the original page but allow you to see those who copied it.
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Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
eHows?? EHOWS??? AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA
you ARE kidding, right? that is just about the single most WORTHLESS site on the entire internet. they pollute EVERY search with their "how to" crap and EVERY single one of them is like this:
How to get a safe deposit box:
1) go to a bank
2) apply for a safe deposit box
3) use safe deposit box
4) dont give your safe deposit box key to anyone
and its ENDLESS, mindless, OBVIOUS garbage like this EVERY damn time. STOP POLLUTING MY SEARCHES WITH CRAP THAT DOESNT ADD A SINGLE THING TO LIFE ON EARTH!
Thank you.
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Re: Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
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Re: Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
http://www.ehow.com/how_2254361_make-money-internet.html
How to Make Money on the Internet
It's not so bad. Really. You'd be hard-pressed to find an eHow article that looks anything like your safe deposit box example.
If you do come across one, perhaps you can post it here so we can have a look. Thanks.
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Re: Re: Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
http://www.ehow.com/how_2125660_microwave-bacon.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_2295_boil-water.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4721839_write-ehow-articles-t hat-money.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_6126547_write-articles-google-rank.html
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
You've also got to wonder then at the specialism of a society where operating a computer to *find* the article is fine, but boiling water without said instructions is beyond you..... :-)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
It puts Google in a tough spot, while the eHow does a great job of answering questions for things we don't really care about the writing quality of, how do you handle when they don't provide a "quality" answer to something that people are passionate about? Perhaps taking cues from Social will eventually be the solution. How many of your friends have ever shared an eHow article?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
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Re: Chas...you're missing the point.
Aw, what a pity that when they asked I told google to never ever show me ehow results, I'll never know what good-quality work I'm missing.
Unfortunately, because I'll never know about the good quality stuff, I'll just remember the crap and smile to myself anytime I do a search knowing with certainty that while I will get crappy results sometimes at least none of them will be ehow crap.
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Even his tagline is saccharine and overly cute "Apple news for the rest of us" Guess what Glenn? I hardly put myself in the same group as you, despite loving my triple-boot Macbook. Fleishman's a self-promoting tool, who actually provides almost no value.
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ah
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Working with Google
There's still a lot of fragmentation, even without allowing for the darkweb - or Java. I expect many have no real concept of how to Search until they hit YouTube.
Dogpile or Info.com aggregate more returns than plain Google anyway, and when I use DeepSearch I get returns from my Diigo library plus other assorted info.
Time was blogging was about where to find good content. Wikis, Twitter and RSS have only added more fuel to the fire.
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Re: Working with Google
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Seek and you will find
1. content is not important to search engine; waste product.
2. people need to fit search engine with new reading glasses now and then.
content colors them rose.
3. if [find stuff] was easy a search engine would not be necessary.
And as a by product no spam content that looks like important content.
4. There is always a photo google find unix
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Busman's holiday
The quoted reason as to why people contribute free content is exactly that - they want to and their emotional desire is sufficient reward for them to perform the task.
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Sorry, but I don't get it
How can Google see if the content is good enough? Like for instance, if you are Indonesian (no offence) and you write an article, but with easy words, is that regarded as bad content?
Thanks in advance
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