Earlier today, through an article in the latest US Wired, I discovered Demand Media. It took me the rest of the afternoon to get my breath back. If you’ve not seen them before, they’re really something: maybe half a rung above something like Datapresser on the scale of evil. Driven by sophisticated algorithms which tell them which search terms are worth targetting, they’re generating huge link-farms of low-budget, low-quality articles and video. Bluntly, they’re overfishing the long tail of search queries.
It takes real guts to run such a sketchy business on such an industrial scale: they’ve raised over $300m in funding so far. A part of me almost admires them for it.
He points out that the focus is off: The rippling water is sharp while the kayaking instructor is slightly blurred. But the company he’s working for won’t care, he says, so why should he — especially for $20 a clip? Within a few hours, he has uploaded his work to Demand Media, his employer for the day. It isn’t Scorsese, but it’s fast, cheap, and good enough.
Thousands of other filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day. The company’s ambitions are so enormous as to be almost surreal: to predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results.
— “The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell”, by Daniel Roth, Wired US November 2009
Meanwhile, Google are picking up criticism, and prominent web developers are chucking venom at the SEO industry.
These people are a cancer and must be destroyed.
— “SEO Scumbags”, by Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.
— “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists”, by Derek Powazek
Everyone ‘knows’ that Google used to be better. But how much can Google really do against turbo-charged content engines like Demand Media? It’s an arms-race. The Bayesian spam filter wars of 2002 are playing out all over again, only this time in Google’s index.
Even so, this might still give rise to an opportunity for someone. Just a thought experiment: what’s going to happen if, for some big high-value niches, Google gets either unpopular or ineffective? The demand’s still going to be there, after all. Who’ll fill it, and how?
