Will social media kill content farms?

An unfortunate side effect of our ‘always-on’ culture, our fast consumption of information and our desire for more, is the industrialisation of content. Content farms. Many companies are turning the production of content into a business, churning out as much content as cheaply as possible in the pursuit of much-needed Google love. After all isn’t fresh content one the things Google loves most? Yes – but it’s not what we love most. We love good, quality content that’s coming from the experts, that we can engage in discussion around. Not what you’re going to get from content farms and hopefully, what will spell the end for this rather bizarre business of generating endless content on an almost auto-pilot basis.

Firstly – what do we mean by content farms? Content farms are sites like Demand Media, whose aim is to produce as much content as possible. They use an algorithm to determine what people are searching for, titles are generated, then ‘human editors’ turn these into articles. You will have seen examples of their content on sites like ehow.com They do all this through their next-generation ‘internet content studio’. You can, hopefully, see all sorts of problems with this approach to producing content. It is an unfortunate side-effect of the ‘content is king’ mantra (which I disputed here). The problem is that I don’t want my content coming from anything that uses an algorithm. I want to read content from people that I recognise as experts, on sites that operate in a niche, so I can trust they know what they’re talking about. Not sites like AOL that have an article for everything under the sun and are now just content machines.

Social will save content

Hopefully, the advances toward social search will change that. These companies have cleverly worked out a way to get to the top of Google, but there’s no real way to influence social search other than really being genuinely good. This is what is hopefully going to spell the end of this era of content farming and calculated pursuit of links. If you write good content, if you build up a community around your site, then people will come. And the more people that come and read your content, if it’s good, then the links will follow. This is great, we all know that Google loves links and I’m not disputing that. But we now have social media, which is fast becoming the default way for me to find new content.

How often do you see people linking to articles on content sites such as AOL or ehow? The answer is not very often, because articles on these kinds of sites aren’t written for people, they’re written for search engine spiders. It’s not the kind of content that’s going to really appeal to you or stand out, because it’s been written by a freelancer who has 50 other articles to churn out that day to meet their quota.

We’ve pretty much reached the point of content saturation. Search for any random topic and you’ll find an article on it somewhere (if, of course, the search traffic justifies it). This doesn’t mean the end of fresh content though and it certainly doesn’t mean the end of good content. Because what we have now with social media is the people behind the content. It’s like cookbooks. There are thousands of cookbooks out there on any given cuisine, but we keep buying new ones because you’ve gotten to know the chef through a TV series, or a friend’s recommended them to you. So you start trying out their version of recipes, even if you’ve cooked your own chilli con carne a hundred times. It’s the same with content online. I don’t just read a story on Mashable and leave it at that, onto the next thing. I want to read the opinions of bloggers or journalists that I regularly follow, I want to read their take on something. This type of opinion and level of insight you’re not going to get from content farms.

If you want to keep your site freshly updated with good content, you could certainly turn to sites like Content Now that are going to produce this cheaply for you and promise you links. But is it going to bring people back to your site again and again? Is it going to have that slant that you, as an expert would give? I personally don’t want articles from a service where ‘content’ is the uniting factor, as if that qualifies you to write about anything. There has to be a person behind the content and this is one of the great advantages of social media, that you can build up that personality through different platforms to bring a targeted audience for your content. And if you don’t have access to that level of expertise in-house, then find someone who does, bring them in as personality on your site and ensure they contribute content regularly. Engagement is key. Content isn’t just about words any more which is why I think the days of content farms are numbered. Hopefully.