Would You Like Herring With That?

December 17th, 2009 → 11:12 pm @ Ian Delaney

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.