Would You Like Herring With That?

The latest storm in a teacup to upset the blo­go­sphere is the spectre of ‘fast-​​food content’. Raised as a threat by McArrington himself, the worry is that fast and loose content quickly gen­er­ated to match popular keywords will swamp quality content in search rankings.

…what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop oper­a­tions that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, dis­pos­able content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

This ‘fast-​​food’ content is actually regur­git­ated. It’s the copies of original material being re-​​written hundreds of times again within a matter of hours of its original pub­lic­a­tion. This may already seem familiar to users of Techmeme. Apparently. if you create lots of content quickly enough about the topic du jour, you can generate lots of traffic. Whether it’s new, well-​​written or popular won’t really matter, Arrington claims. It only has to be ‘popular enough’ to tip the scales of Google recog­ni­tion and AdSense style advert­ising revenues.

E-​​consultancy today attempted to pour oil on the waters, claiming:

There is a market for content of all types, just as there’s a market for res­taur­ants of all types. You might scarf down an occa­sional Big Mac at McDonald’s, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never make reser­va­tions at the most expensive res­taurant in town. And so it goes with content. If you’re looking for inform­a­tion on how to change the oil in your car, you could probably do far worse than the eHow article on the matter.

I think I may be a bit thick, but I don’t really under­stand the problem:

• There has always been a wealth of cheap/​free content on the Web. That’s part of what makes it good.
• Some of that is good quality e.g. much of Wikipedia and some of it is….mmm not so much e.g. Linkfarm material, Answers.com.
• Google – the search engine used by almost everyone – has worked out how to cir­cum­vent much of the bad material by depending on the volume of inbound links, whose weighting is in turn determ­ined by the cred­ib­ility of those link-​​makers, among other criteria.
• Google also reg­u­larly updates the ways in which it finds people trying to cheat their way to the top of search rankings by, for example, rewriting content from other sites and then inter-​​linking.

More import­antly, I think we’ve already estab­lished at this point that lots of search engine traffic is not a very effective way to try to make money for a news pub­lisher. The UK news­pa­pers’ relent­less war to become the sites with the largest number of monthly uniques over the last 5–10 years has left them all almost pen­ni­less. Randoms don’t click on the ads, you see.

What they really want is useful content and useful readers:

Relevant and responsive read­er­ships for advert­isers = revenue.

Brands readers trust for quality and such = revenue.

Readers who want value-​​adds = revenue.

Useful and valuable branded content for relevant read­er­ships = revenue.

A bunch of randoms who found you on Google = MASSIVE SERVER FEES AND NO RETURN (see FAST FOOD).

Arrington shouldn’t fear the fast-​​food mer­chants, he should fear the main­stream media catching up on his turf. They may often be a little hapless, not terribly online savvy, but there are an awful lot of them and they’ve still got lots of money to invest in digital pub­lishing to find models that work. And they will keep coming, wave after wave.

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