CNN.com writes:
“”Demand Media….operates on a …”content farm” model: They choose topics people are searching for on the internet, pay a “journalist” a tiny amount to write something — anything — about it, then slap it on the Web so people will click on it.”
“Demand Media already was cranking out 4,000 videos a day in late 2009. And they were on pace to publish 1 million items a month by this summer.”
“Cranking out by-the-numbers copy, with profit as the only motive, just junks up the Web for everyone. It cynically betrays the promise of what the internet could, and should, be.”
“And maybe it won’t work. The Wall Street Journal has said Demand has never made a profit. And just this week, there were reports that Demand is delaying a public stock offering because of concerns about its accounting practices.”
Ouch.
To see the rest of the top 10 list of tech fails which by the way also includes 3-D TV (#2) on the list check out the full article here.
Hello Mike,
We are not surprised that a journalistic pundit, whose greatest accomplishment is judging others, would make a critical call like this. What does this person really know about internet enterprises anyway? Opinions are like assholes everyones got one. Media pundits almost always get things wrong, its actually their job. I personally have had experience with media news people, where they totally misrepresented my comments on public TV. They cut and snipped and rearrainged my interview comments to suit the story they wanted to broadcast. Believe me the news cast turned everything upside down to make a perfectly believable lie to their audiences. Beware the propaganda macine!!
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Metal Tiger)
On the matter of DM and content farms in general, I couldn’t agree more.
You hit the trusty old information superhighway looking for info on a topic only to see that the top 5 serps are garbage-farm articles penned by “content writers” who don’t have the slightest clue about what they’re talking about… So, after they write their $5 “article” on distressed debt investing, they then write a $5 “article” on Alpacas, then a $5 “article” on heart surgery, then a $5 “article” on paddling the Amazon in a flat bottom canoe… usually nothing more than reworded Wikipedia content an an authoritatively stated opinion or two to add the illusion of credibility. The entire process is just absurd.
There’s a part of me that hopes Adsense is really a big trap to round up all the worthless content producers on the web, make one giant masterlist and deindex them for life.
I wrote 22 quality articles on Demand Media’s Ehow. Such articles cover dreams, online education, traffic fines, graphing, filing the Hope tax credit and etc.
In my opinion, I think that Demand Media’s new company Demand Studios has a different format that may be ineffective.
I don’t think Demand Studio is trying to pump out content only to make a
profit. They have good “how to” articles that help people. Yahoo just acquired a popular “how to” platform. WSJ’s evaluation is misguided. There are many blogs that have poor content.
Anon
The writers receive a minimum of $15 writing “how to” articles for Demand Studios. Moreover, they have an option to choose revenue share.
Domainers that brag about purchasing cheap articles from companies are essentially using writers to make revenue. They have no clue about the topic. Their only goal is to build traffic and to make revenue. The Internet is not an honest platform. People have to determine what information is credible and what is unreliable.
Valuations over 1 billion for a company that is truly 100% at the mercy of a google index algo change were a huge red flag to begin with…this was more about original investors trying to recoup their money from what I have read, while individual authors may believe that they are doing something for the betterment of society, this company is solely focussed on trying to make money
That was the only one of the ten which wasn’t actually a fail. More like something that pisses CNN off. lol
The Internet is not an honest platform.
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Correct, and monetized content plays a large role in making the internet significantly less useful. Yes, ‘domainers’ and the things they do are sometimes a cog in this machine.
The problem is, Demand Media presents itself as an ‘honest source’ of information. It took educators years to figure out that Wikipedia wasn’t an academic source and to stop accepting it as a citation for facts- and honestly, Wikipedia is usually correct. Farmed content is fabrication. One of my own fields of expertise happens to be a ‘high click price’ area and as such, is slummed up with farmed content written by retards who haven’t the slightest clue what they’re addressing, but they sure write as they do.
CNN was bang-on in naming content farming as a tech fail. I’d have named it #1.
Travesty, as it’s mostly known today, is a Perl program for scrambling
a text based on the frequency with which pairs of words appear in the original text. The result is a strange parody of the original It can also be used to scramble multiple texts – which creates a parody that algorithmically draws parallels between the two (because it reveals how some of the same idioms/structures are used between the two.) It’s been used in a number of arty projects in the past few years.
Travesty is often thought to have originated from the Perl hacker community – the Perl source is distributed as part of the Perl distribution, and in fact, it is popular with Perl hackers.
However, the original implementation was written (not in Perl) in 1984 by literary critic Hugh Kenner and Joseph O’Rourke as an algorithmic poetry tool.
They introduced it in an article in Byte magazine called “A Travesty Generator for Micros.”
So Travesty has its roots in both the literary world and geekdom.
I wish I could find a lawyers to sue their @sses off. I followed their instructions to the ‘T’ and now I’m almost brain dead http://www.ehow.com/brain-surgery/
I am writing for eHow, part of Demand Media. I write mostly about home audio, car audio, RVs and outdoor living. My only problem is finding credible references elsewhere on the internet, to support my writing. But that does not mean I write hack pieces: I installed car audio for eight years. I designed and built loudspeakers and installed commercial and institutional sound systems. I lived full-time in three different RVs for three years, and I have hiked since 1972. In other words, if there was nothing credible on the net about a subject, once I write about it on eHow, there is something people can take to the bank. I would like to be paid more though: at 60 years old my experience should count for something.
Jan
I agree that experience is invaluable.
It could be the CNN is finding that not all of the writers have your level of expertise in the subjects they are writing about and/or CNN could just be wrong about ehow.
If your not getting paid enough for your work you might consider starting your own blog, get your own advertisers or go to work for someone how already have established one
Ehow is not my cup of tea but I can see that it (and other Demand Media sites) do add value to the web and are not just junking it up. In the end if users don’t see value in something and it is produced on a mass scale then the search engines will come to realise that and devalue it. But if it is something like ehow that is providing a service then it will be treated nicely. I do think that Demand Media is probably overvalued but at the same time think they are onto a good thing also.