Last year, I received an e-mail from a woman who was starting a rehab center for the stars in Hawaii. She wanted a blog on her website to increase her google rank and asked me to write a blog for her. I wasn't interested in writing rehab posts, but I thought I might start a business hooking up all my semi-employed publishing and writer friends with businesses that needed content.

That lead to much scheming and planning and research, along with two friends of mine. We quickly discovered that there was no profit in good content. There's plenty of profit in bad, typo ridden content that is mass produced by people who aren't that proficient in the English language. One of these content farms was located in the Philippeans.

Businesses use these content farms to produce lots of words, infused with special magic words that increase its google rank. System Engine Optimization in other words. Google swears that it has some hot new algorithm that can sniff out SEO, but I imagine that won't take much for the content farms to psyche out the formula and adjust. 

AOL made Arianna Huffington very rich a couple of weeks ago, darling. Huffington's genius was to hire a staff of people to do what Matt Drudge does. She steals content from other sources. She uses the smartest SEO types. She gets her celebrity friends to write vanity posts. She pumped a ton of money out of venture capitalists. Still, it's not entirely clear that her operation is all that profitable. 

The New York Times is going to withdraw behind a paywall soon, like the Wall Street Journal. It hasn't made enough money from ads on its website to justify offering all that content for free. It will certainly lose a lot of readers, but those readers were free loaders anyway. Maybe a handful will start paying for the content. 

Except for a handful of random bloggers, nobody is getting rich from the ads on the sidebar. It's beer money. 

So, where's the money? The money is with Charlie Sheen. In two days, he gathered 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. A local company helped him set up his account and showed him how to use picture add-ons. That company works with celebrities, like Kim Kardashian, who advertise products like lipstick and perfume on twitter. Kardashian makes $10,000 per tweet. 

There's got to be some way to make smart content profitable on the Internet. Right now the only money is found on celebrity tweets, recycled content, barely literate content, and porn.

(disclaimer: writing on an iPad in Starbucks.)