Smart Mosch - Stop Throwing Articles Online!

Content Farms represent a new concept in the online discourse today and appeared by addressing the problematic of Internet saturation with duplicate, poor and useless articles that distract readers from accessing the true relevant content they’re searching for.

The massive amount of content which I classified in my previous articles as being garbage, or, in a more polite way, residual content, is, to a certain extent, what makes money go round in this new “clickable” era.

To write …

I know a lot of people who write for big sites like content farms (ReadWriteWeb mentions Demand Media as being the leader in generating page views through all of its sub-sites). I also know it brings writers a sort of self esteem and authority feeling to have their articles show on top of search results. But the comfort of doing everything by the 3-click rule makes writers be lazy and easy to trick. Give them a platform, some catchy slogans and a big “Sign up” button and they’ll join you.

Add some tutorials, some “how to make money” tips and they’ll start biting each piece of online content and turn it into the best reachable result for readers. I’m really curious what’s in the mind of someone who joins these platforms. Knowing that you take an engagement of “submitting” tons of content daily, weekly, monthly… rings no alarm? There must be some big compromise to this which everyone seems to agree.

People write more because they don’t have time to write less. As writing less means writing quality, which takes more time to achieve. There are thousands of writers who join content farms, either freelance, collaborating or fully paid. Why are they still doing this?

Or not to write …

Rephrasing the online conversation is the next step in improving online experience for everyone from writers, readers, passive viewers or addicts. So to build up the place for better content means to involve each of them. Not writing articles for content farms is a vote for promoting quality.

There are plenty of serious articles online, so why not promoting them instead of those nagging fully SEO optimized tricky pieces of content that show up on search results? I personally am sick of scanning for “about”, “answers”, “wikianswers”, “ehow”, “articlebase” or “ezine” just to make sure I don’t click them.

Writers interested on this topic are predicting a need for a big change on how search engines work and surface information. So until search engines will gain their reliability back it remains in the hands of individual readers to separate good content from the bad one.

These are the questions: How do you stay away from these money making content farms?

Writing articles on your own wastes precious time for marketing and reaching readers, while writing for content farms brings you instant visibility, high traffic and revenue. I believe it’s more than a matter of simple choice, and it’s rather about the ethics of individual participation to the online environment.

What happens to all the content out there?

Why is residual content shamelessly making so many writers happy just because it brings traffic? Didn’t we, as readers, have enough ads to spam our brains with? Now we need to watch out for the low quality content that bumps into our search results. What kind of mediocrity are we tacitly agreeing?

A lot of people comment about this, so a call for action does exist. We just need to learn how to rephrase the online conversation I was talking about earlier.

In his influential article at RWW, Richard MacManus states his question about the survival of quality: “Given the impact that content farms are having right now, how can producers of ‘quality’ content survive?” The answers lies on a serious reconsideration on how search engines, the big results providers, will better filter content and make a proper differentiation on quality versus quantity in the future.

So what would you do as a writer?

Work at the farm to produce residual content OR rather become a supporter of quality and join the revolutionary spirit? It is only up to you whether you want or not to continue reading poor articles and work hard to find good ones.