This post has been written by Guillaume Decugis, Scoop.it’s CEO, and has been published on Business Insider
A little more than a year ago, Wired Magazine published a story on Demand Media describing in details how what’s now being called Content Farms worked. It looked brilliant. No more articles produced in the vague by journalists with no idea of who would be interested in reading them. Demand Media had it all figured out: analyze Google and you’ll not only know what people are interested in reading about, but also in what companies are interested in advertising about.
But Demand Media and Content Farms didn’t stop here. They’ve pushed further the industrial rationalization of the media business: now that you know what content to produce, get it done fast and cheap by starving freelancers. And recruit SEO Top Guns to make sure your sites rank first in Google. No need for quality content produced by well-paid journalists: if you know how to perform search engine optimization, your low quality, rapidly-produced video or “article” will top Google’s results and dwarf playing-by-the-book regular media’s traffic.
If you pushed the model further, it was like imagining the future of media being a content factory (Demand Media and the likes), distributed by a search algorithm (Google Search) and monetized by an advertising factory (Google AdSense).
The Matrix.
And it might actually happen…
What’s interesting to me is that it might not. For a number of reasons and trends we start to see emerge.
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