Demand Media Threatens Critic Blog

from the are-these-lawyers-stupid? dept

There are a ton of so-called "sucks sites" out there, set up to critique or just ridicule a particular company. Early on, companies often tried to sue such sites out of existence using questionable trademark claims. These efforts mostly (though not always) failed. But, more importantly, the process really backfired thanks to the Streisand Effect. Every time a company went legal after a sucks site, the site and its content only got significantly more attention. Two years ago, it was claimed that corporate lawyers had finally wised up and realized that going legal on such sites only gave those sites significantly more attention.

However, since then, we still hear about such legal threats all the time. Apparently there are still a lot of lawyers out there who haven't received the message. The latest apparently is Demand Media, the content farm giant. Its lawyers sent a cease & desist and a takedown to Demand Studio Sucks.

Rather than a full legal threat against the site, it was focused on the fact that some users on the site had apparently uploaded a presentation in the forums, which Demand considered to be proprietary. Thus, the basis of the takedown was that it violated the company's copyrights and trademark. It appears that DSS's ISP overreacted and rather than taking down the specific content, took down the entire forum. Of course, all this has done is drive much more attention to the content Demand wants removed: a presentation slide showing how Demand is trying to increase quality (now that Google has changed its algorithm to punish crappy quality content that Demand has been associated with in the past).

Demand's lawyers claim:

Demand Media has not granted you any license to use the Demand Media trademark, to publish or copy Demand Media copyrighted content, or to publicize Demand Media’s confidential and proprietary business information. Accordingly, in addition to violating Demand Media’s intellectual property rights in the referenced materials, the postings are disruptive, damaging and harmful to our business practices and reputation.

The intellectual property claims seem totally unfounded. There's no trademark claim. There's no consumer confusion or dilution here at all. No one thinks that DSS is "endorsed" by Demand Media. The copyright claim is dubious. Looking at the blog post in question, I can't see how it's not fair use. It's showing a single slide from a presentation that's certainly relevant, and providing significant commentary on that slide.

The "damaging and harmful to our business practices and reputation" claims are also pretty dubious, though I guess there could be some random state law claims they're thinking they could use here. But, I just don't see it. Someone reporting critically on your business may be disruptive and damaging, but is not illegal. And, honestly, the slide presentation in question is hardly some giant corporate secret. The slide is so bland and pointless and corporatey, it doesn't really give away anything.

Honestly, it's hard to believe anyone thought it was a wise move to go after DSS this way. It just gets them more attention and makes Demand look petty and silly. It's no surprise that the Forbes coverage of this story (the original link above) highlights that this happened at the same time as Demand's valuation dropped under $1 billion for the first time....

Filed Under: blogs, critics, legal threats, sucks sites
Companies: demand media

As Expected, Google's Changes Are Bleeding Demand Media & Other Content Farms

from the easy-call dept

About a year ago, there were all these complaints about how sites like Demand Media were "cluttering" up the internet. However, as we predicted at the time, this was only a temporary issue, and had more to do with the current state of filters, rather than the content itself. The internet has always been filled with a ton of crap, but it didn't matter because you didn't see most of it, and you could ignore the pieces here and there that you did run into. The real complaint people had wasn't that content farms were "cluttering up the internet," but that Google wasn't doing a good job providing relevant content. Clearly that changed when Google made its big anti-content farm move recently.

At the time, Demand Media played down the switch, claiming it was no big deal because it wasn't a content farm. It appears that Google (and its users) disagree. Google's traffic to Demand Media content has apparently dropped by nearly 40% according to various reports. That can't be good for the bottom line. What amazes me, however, is that people bought into Demand Media's IPO earlier this year despite the fact that Google made it clear it was planning to demote content farms like Demand Media days before the company's IPO.

The report notes that the impact on other sites has been even stronger:

Mahalo's Google traffic is down 78 percent, Associate Content's is down 61 percent and Examiner.com is down 51 percent.

You think Yahoo is regretting its purchase of Associated Content yet?

Filed Under: content farms, filters
Companies: demand media, google

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 change

Recently, 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!

Filed Under: content farms, search results
Companies: demand media, google

Google Effectively Puts Demand Media On Notice Days Before Planned IPO

from the well,-look-at-that... dept

Over the last year or so, there was growing concern about how "content farms" like Demand Media and Associated Content were "clogging up" search engines and cluttering the web with junk content. However, as we noted last summer, this is really a filter problem, rather than a content problem as many were claiming, and we assumed that, sooner or later, Google would realize that people hate this type of content and it would adjust its algorithm to filter it out (or to make it a lot less prominent). It appears that time may be coming. Over the last few weeks there have been a bunch of articles complaining about the decreasing usefulness of Google, in large part due to those content farms.

It looks like Google is finally waking up to this issue. Google spam-fighter-in-chief, Matt Cutts, has posted on the Official Google blog that the company has heard the complaints and realizes its algorithms need to be better at not recommending content farm crap that people don't like:

As "pure webspam" has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to "content farms," which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we're not perfect, and combined with users' skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.

The timing on this is especially interesting, given that the leading content farm, Demand Media, is looking to go public next week. The company's IPO is already considered to be pretty questionable, for a variety of reasons, including (but not limited to) the general sleaziness of how the company has been run -- including lying about profitability (and even suggesting others do it since no one gets caught), using highly questionable accounting tricks to make the company look more profitable than it really is, and the fact that insiders are dumping a huge amount of stock in the IPO. And, oh yeah, it relies really heavily on Google to make its money. So finding out that Google is likely to cut off at least some of that gravy train probably isn't what the company wanted to hear this week.

Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, however. While everyone has been complaining about content farms, it's time for the filters to step up and re-assert their own importance by diminishing the crappy content that no one wants to see.

Filed Under: content farms, filters, search
Companies: demand media, google

Journalists Worried About Content Farms Are Missing The Point: The Web Has Always Been Filled With Crap

from the stop-worrying-about-what-others-are-doing dept

There's been a lot of fretting lately in the journalism field about the rise of so-called "content farms." These are operations like Demand Media or Associated Content (recently purchased by Yahoo) or even AOL's "Seed" experiment, that focus on generating a ton of content at very low cost, mostly aimed at ranking high on search engines. Last year, Wired Magazine ran a pretty good story covering the details of this particular business model. Basically, you find really cheap freelancers, tell them to quickly write up content on "popular" topics, pay them very, very little and don't worry too much about quality. The whole point is to rank high in search engines when people search on various topics.

Not surprisingly, this state of affairs worries some journalists who fear that these "content farms" are "killing" journalism. In fact, a group of online content syndicators are even talking about setting up an official "online quality" standards guidelines for internet content, even to the point of considering "accrediting" whatever is considered "quality" journalism.

I certainly understand and recognize the concern. When you look at much of the content produced by these content farms (and it's certainly worth pointing out that these operations deny the whole "content farm" claim -- as well as the insinuation that their content is bad), it's hard not to quickly recognize that much of the content is really, really bad. It's not well written. It's not very thorough. It's often not very accurate or useful. But, even given all of that, the "concerns" that this is somehow harming journalism seem wildly overblown.

The internet has always been filled with a lot more crappy content than good content. That's what every internet-hater points out first. But that's always been a search and filter problem. Bad content does not directly impact good content unless you become obsessed over the fact that some people are reading the bad content over your good content. In the early days, it's why sites like Yahoo developed in the first place: as a directory to try to help you find the good content instead of the crappy content (so, yeah, Yahoo buying a content farm is a bit ironic). And when the concept of "directories" became overwhelmed, we moved onto search, mostly based on things like metatags. And when that got gamed to death such that crappy content crowded out the ability to find good content, we moved on to much better search algorithms, like those found at Google, which tried to solve that basic problem.

The situation that we're in right now is one where the current filtering mechanisms might not yet be good enough to distinguish quality content from crappy content. But that's a temporary state of affairs. On top of that, one person's crappy content may be good enough for whatever it is they're trying to do or understand. There is no rule that says the best quality content has to win. For those of us who like quality content (and, every so often, try to produce it), it may be painful to hear that, but welcome to the competitive marketplace. If someone's serving the need better than you, then that's the market you deal with. It doesn't mean that quality content producers should crappify their content, but it might mean they need to rethink some aspects of what they're doing -- such as not relying on crappy filters as the source of your traffic.

It's that last point that highlights the real "problem" that journalists seem to have with these content farms. The journalists have become so convinced that Google is where they need to get all their traffic, that when Google ranks web farm content higher, that's somehow the fault of the content farms. In reality, it means that relying on Google for traffic may be a mistake. Quality content is hard to figure out algorithmically, though my guess is that Google is working on this issue all the time. If Google starts realizing that people do, in fact, find content farm content to be useless, that content will eventually get rated down, no matter how much they try to play SEO games.

But, even beyond that, the way people discover and consume higher quality content is changing as well. The value of "passed" or "earned" links -- i.e., links that are sent around via email or social networks -- is growing rapidly, and that's the sort of filter that tends to focus more on "better" content, rather than pure content farm content. So, in the end, this seems like a "problem" that corrects itself over time. Sure, right now, these content farms are good at getting their content seen. But if that content really isn't that useful, the rest of the market will adapt and adjust.

Filed Under: content farms, journalism, quality
Companies: aol, associated content, demand media