TheWayoftheWeb

The ‘content farm’ strategy of building huge numbers of writers producing content for relatively low payments has been receiving increased coverage as aol concentrates on becoming a content firm rather than a technology firm.

It’s a tactic also being used by the likes of Demand Media and Answers.com, and has also been utilised by companies such as Yahoo. The fear is that a few thousand writers will produce enough content to severely distort the internet ecosystem and lead to a web ruled by low-quality content which targets the lowest common denominator.

Aside from the irony of bloggers using ‘low quality content’ as a criticism of another internet content strategy after the label has been unfairly levelled at them for years, I’m sure that it’s not the blogging companies and individuals that have most to fear.

It’s traditional media companies that will be hit first by another broadside – they have formal structures which will be impossible to change in time to respond to a new threat.

Based on my experience working for the largest UK magazine publisher for many years, (talking to many other people reveals most companies aren’t too far removed), the structure hasn’t radically changed for most people with print taking the majority of resource (Including designers, sub-editors, etc), and the digital teams still fighting to either gain parity or integration as the inequality between print and digital revenues continues to hold them back.

Now they’re about to get hit by an army of content writers. More importantly, this army will be hitting SEO-friendly articles in a more effective way than print teams have managed, and they’ll also have the benefit of significant resource and big brand names/internet properties as bases to build from.

If any large print company radically alter what they’re doing in a timescale of less than 6 months, it’d be a miracle.

If they want to take on this threat head-to-head, it’d require a complete focus-change and retooling within days and weeks.

And UK media companies are in an even worse position than their generally more evolved US counterparts, with a smaller geographical area and audience, less subscription-based revenue, and a small pool of extremely low-cost freelance talent if they were to try this route.

Meanwhile I actually think most blogs will be fine – the most general sites may experience problems, although I think the likes of Techcrunch and Mashable mix size and flexibility well enough to adapt as needed. And individuals who are producing far more specific niche content should have an advantage in producing articles which not only target SEO traffic, but also provide far greater value – and they’ll also be able to get more specific as necessary. Yes, they’ll have far bigger challenges to grow their readership, but they’ll be able to differentiate with higher-quality, longer, more in-depth displays of their specialist knowledge, and hopefully many of them will finally embrace and prove the ‘1000 true fans’ theory.

Bloggers of all sizes also have one huge advantage – they’ve built their success on a personal brand, whether it’s Mike Arrington, Pete Cashmore, or someone writing about collecting vintage bottle caps. This is something that is difficult to replicate or attack, and means that existing audiences are likely to show greater loyalty, whilst also being more likely to commit to sharing via word-of-mouth and social media.

The widespread belief seems to be that Google will solve all of this by putting more weighting on real-time sharing of content, and less on generic content of the type which has seen spam blogs tackled to some extent. While I think this will happen, it’s going to take some time, and some Twitter users are susceptible to Retweeting anything with a snappy headline.

So what can UK media companies do? Well, they may get a brief window in which to change, bearing in mind all the content farms are primarily America, so certain differences in language should preserve a reasonable amount of UK traffic.

They have to personalise their content producers and their brands, produce numerous niche sites with extremely small editorial teams, and prepare for low profit margins for the foreseeable future.

Besides the fact I’ve worked for a number of traditional print-based companies for years, and spent a long time at one in particular, I’m confident about the possibility to still be able to build a thriving online property around content – so much so that I’ve committed to a new side-project with a couple of great people which will hopefully reinforce my point. Expect more details on it shortly!