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.