Today's reading: Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal does a sort of Barbara Ehrenreich Lite turn and lives life as a lowly Web "content creator." Gomes solicited work writing content for online sites. He discovers that the work is laughably poorly paid and that the sites soliciting material are really only interested in reworked boilerplate:
"Understanding what's happening requires a lesson in modern Web economics. If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you've set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance.
"Then, to get your site ranked high in search engines, it's best to have "original content" about whatever the subject of your site happens to be. The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for. But it can't be just an outright copy of what's on some other site; you get penalized for that by search engines.
"Hence, there has been an explosion of demand for 'original content.' ... You'd think this would be a godsend for writers. Hah.
"Curious to learn more about the process, I bid on some writing jobs on the Web sites where these transactions occur. (I described myself quite honestly: as a Journal reporter interested in freelance work who might also write a Journal story about writing for Web sites.)
"I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as 'Whirlywinds.' I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything."
Yeah, 25,000 words for $100; that's .25 cents a word. Not surprisingly, Gomes approaches the job as an experienced, highly paid journalist would. The first article he turns in is the product of some actual research and reporting (even if the reporting consisted only of "interviewing" colleagues at the Journal). But spending a couple of working days on that reduces his pay to just 15 cents an hour, though, and reality sets in. The real "original content" game involves touching up material copied and pasted from other websites. Gomes begs off when he's asked to commit what amounts to plagiarism.
Gomes correctly points out that what lies at the bottom of this junk-content phenomenon is the widespread effort to game Google and the other search engines, which despite their relative sophistication are not smart enough by and large to distinguish between sites producing authoritative information and those that are merely ripping them off.
My colleague Ted says he thinks the proliferation of bad content is the search engines' fault: In essence, they've created a market for crummy content that imitates good content. Maybe so -- but no matter how smart search engines get, people will try to exploit them if they believe they can make a few bucks in the process. In the short run, anyway, this points up the importance of human intelligence as an extra filter in the content-analysis process.
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