Last week, Yahoo bought Associated Content, a five year old company, for $90 million. There's a rising demand for content on business websites to help build a company's image and to increase the Google rank of the company. AC provides the content, but without having any writers or editors on staff. What?
You're the owner of a small chain of pool filter shops and you need to punch up your website. It doesn't make sense for you to waste time writing information yourself. You're too busy, and you aren't that great of a writer. So, you go to Associated Content or to one of its copycat competitions, search for content by a keyword, find the best article for you, and purchase it.
These companies have hundreds of pre-written articles and blog posts that writers have submitted with the hopes of getting published. While there is a huge demand online content, there is a bigger supply of unemployed writers who are desperate to put publications on their resume and are willing to give away their words.
I spent some time looking at these businesses and geeking out over how smart they are. These businesses are simply a big database. They don't need to employ writers; the writers come to them and lend them their words on consignment. They don't employ editors; the clients do the quality control themselves by looking through the articles. They don't interact with the client at all; the database and the tags do all the work. They really act as brokers and take a percentage from both writer and business owner. The only employees have to be computer geeks who designed the database.
I am partly in awe of the genius of these content databases. It's pure profit. I'm partly horrified by them. They take advantage of that huge pool of unemployed literature majors. They provide content for companies that don't care too much about quality. There's a cynicism underlying this business model that's a little disturbing.
Photographers complain that digital cameras, Flicker, and stock photographer companies have reduced the cost of a photograph so much that they can't earn a living. Amateur photographers are producing professional level photographs and are selling them cheaply. These new content companies are going to have the same impact on professional writers.
Apt. 11d 
Stock photos have been around for a long time — even before the advent of high-level amateur photography; stock writing has been around, too.
I think the key difference is that both those data bases got a lot, lot bigger, because of amateurs who are willing to provide content at very low prices (free doesn’t quite work for this kind of endeavor, unless you’re doing pure aggregation or links). That creates value for the consumer, ’cause it means you can use a “stock” photo without it being used by everyone else (though they could, and that’s one of the reasons you wouldn’t want to use it, unless you don’t care). It decreases the value of any individual work, though.
In the old days, I could spot “stock” writing easily; stock photography fairly easily. I don’t know how much this will change with larger data bases.
And, I think you’re underestimating the creativity involved in producing and searching large databases. Google, after all, has built an empire with computer geeks who built searching algorithms. There’s real creativity there — that’s why they won the search battle. If these guys create something like that, well, it’s not cynical at all. If they create a service for companies who are satisfied with low quality content, well, that’s not so good, but it’s the responsibility of the consumers of that content to rebel against it.
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Cleanly structured content is the whole value-add of any database, and as such is a worthy basis for a business. I always laugh when I see TV crime shows — they are swimming in the erroneous impression that the whole world has highly-structured data living in a high-performance database and available for instant search. Puh-lease.
However I disagree that such companies don’t need editors. One of the most important elements of any data store is its cleanliness. If it’s not clean, it can’t be trusted. And if it can’t be trusted its value goes way down — you have to check everything that comes out of it. So much for your time savings. (Unless you don’t care about quality, which is another conversation for another day.)
And so I think the future is bright for editors! But you’re right — until writers stop giving away their work product, it’s going to be a tough way to make a living.
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And if it can’t be trusted its value goes way down — you have to check everything that comes out of it.
I wonder if anybody, either within Associated Content or the purchasers, is actually checking. On the one hand, I doubt they are because that costs a great deal of money. On the other hand, it couldn’t be that hard to write an article on getting the most from your slow cooker that reads completely normal until the 2nd to last paragraph mentions “3/4th of a cup of rodent feces.”
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You know who finds content problems? Sales people who have clients ask, Why exactly do you have an article on cooking rodent feces on your site? And then you get an earful from the (already annoying) sales person about how hard you’re making their life. And then the sales boss calls the web site boss and says, make sure your people check the content. And the web site boss tries to fob it off on editorial, who lost all their headcount the hear before when that same web site boss brought up a great cost-savings idea called “Associated Content”. So clearly they’re not pitching in. And so the web site boss has to either decide to A) hire someone or clear staff time to check all the content, B) find a better provider, or C) decide the content’s too big of a pain and ask for the always-ominous usage report saying how many viewers actually *read* the content on the web site. That little usage-log-check thing usually ends with the content being pulled in its entirety. End of Associated Content’s revenue stream.
Remember when the intern from the McCain campaign put up plagiarized recipes in “Cindy’s Kitchen” or some such? Exactly.
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I didn’t mean to underestimate the creativity in setting up databases. In fact, I spent some time this weekend admiring the genius of the Associated Content’s database. I do feel sad that this database seemed to marginalize the professions of many of my friends. But I guess you get what you pay for.
Rodent feces, heh.
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Jen, are you daring me?
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I dunno, why write things that are pre-commodified?
Unless, say, Trenton Consolidated Pools/Island Prodcts (TCP/IP) is itself so generic as to be indistinguishable from other fine pool paraphernalia providers (PPP), I’m having a hard time seeing why they wouldn’t want to distinguish themselves on the web as well. If it turns out that Hopewell Township Tantalizing Pools (HTTP), Princeton’s Outstanding Pools (POP), Sourland Mountain Terraces and Pools (SMTP) and Franklin-Trenton Pools (FTP) have all been snagging the same impeccable customer-motivating praises (ICMP) from Associated Content, somebody is going to wind up looking kinda dumb.
Am I missing something?
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Doug,
Yeah. I feel like I can smell this stuff a mile away. It’s like it’s written by one of the novel-making machines from 1984–bland, inoffensive, watered-down, content-free, which makes the term “content” a bit ironic.
You’ll like this, by the way:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/websites_stop
It’s 8 Websites You Need to Stop Building.
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bland, inoffensive, watered-down, content-free
As opposed to all the content written by the marketing staff? There’s a difference here? (Did I just say that out loud?)
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If it turns out that Hopewell Township Tantalizing Pools (HTTP), Princeton’s Outstanding Pools (POP), Sourland Mountain Terraces and Pools (SMTP) and Franklin-Trenton Pools (FTP) have all been snagging the same impeccable customer-motivating praises (ICMP)
Doug, I feel like you are probably physically very close to me at the moment.
Also, I think you are not understanding what “Content” you are paying for. In your example, what you want are articles like “How To Clean Mildew Off Pool Tiles,” “Ten Tips Before You Open Your Pool For The Season,” and “Why Won’t My Pool Keep It’s pH Level Longer?”
If I’ve got a pool problem, and live in Ewing, I could go to any of your pool stores. If one of them has helpful content, and pops up higher on Google as a result, I’m going to bring my business to that one.
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Mentally, yes; temporally, no. But the protocols all make me closer.
Beyond that, I guess it’s empirical questions (unless of course it’s turtles all the way down): Do the totally generic articles have more Google juice than something customized? Will one shop have the generic articles while the others go about naked, as it were? Will the stores that opt for generic not choose the same generics? Will they all get bought out by Imperial Pools V-6 (IPv6)?
Confused? You won’t be…
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I miss Soap. That’s never on re-run anymore.
I wonder who (Associated Content, author, purchaser) would face what liability for an article the recommended using a blow dryer while standing in the tub or something?
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Do the totally generic articles have more Google juice than something customized? Will one shop have the generic articles while the others go about naked, as it were?
I think the point is that you’ve got to pay someone to write the customized articles, while the generic ones come cheaper. If you happen to be selling something (like pool products) that are largely fungible, the added cost of customizing your content may not lead to enough added value.
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From what I understand, a lot of these articles from these content sites are written to be very modular based. Paragraphs have to be interchangeable so that the same content can be repurposed on multiple webpages without being identical (to the search engines, at least), giving lots more “content” for the purchaser.
The pay to write for these projects still sucks. As you note, this will have an impact on the finances of professional writers!
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“Ten Tips Before You Open Your Pool For The Season,”
Those articles have been around for a while, no? They appear in those pseudo-newspapers, and on web sites, and in brochures. They’re also frustratingly annoying, most of them. Unfortunately, they often seem to be all you can find about those issues, too (the generic content drives out the good).
I think the only way the good content can survive is if consumers actively search for it. I think that’s not a lost cause, ’cause i think people are becoming more sophisticated consumers of content. In photography, for example, the quality of pictures people use in their holiday cards is getting better and better. As it gets better and better, everyone’s eye becomes more sophisticated. Initially, this better content is driven by the accessibility of free photography (mom with her camera). But, eventually, I think there’s a potential that the more sophisticated eye starts looking for even more sophisticated photos. That could end up providing a market (though not necessarily at the level for when content provision was a scarce resource because the means of dissemination were minimal).
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Browse Amazon’s Mechanical Turk work clearinghouse, and see how much lower your morale can sink.
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