Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: The Content Mill Way
Posted on | August 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
By John D. Vincent
Special for Displaced Journalists
The revelation that Demand Studios is producing content for reputable news sites is disturbing. Like a rancid baklava, it is bad on countless levels.
For those of you who don’t know, Demand Studios produces short, rigidly-formatted articles for a variety of sites using a pool of underpaid and under-supervised freelancers.
Originally limited to how-to content for sites like eHow.com, Demand has now inked deals with USA Today, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Houston Chronicle to provide feature content.
Confession: I worked for them.
Shortly after I lost my newspaper Web job, I wrote several articles for Demand Studios’ ridiculously low pay, happy to pad my resume with recent writing samples.* I discovered that while I was taking several hours to write well-researched original content using multiple sources, Demand Studios had many “reporters” who were completing several stories a day.
Officially, Demand has a zero tolerance for plagiarism policy and claims to use software to prevent copyright violations. But it’s clear that much of the content (let’s be generous) is highly derivative. Or less-kindly put, their content is often one step removed from plagiarism.
I can’t say all Demand Studios content is rewritten, but much of it is. It’s hard to imagine a reporter writing several stories a day if he or she is making calls, conducting interviews or reading entire books. The company has a business model that incentivizes taking shortcuts and penalizes quality reporting.
A disruption of the news ecology
Anybody who thinks about the evolution of news understands the two kinds of creatures living in the Journalistic Sea. The dominant species are original-news fish and the lesser residents are rewrite leeches. Let’s call them news parasites. The Web has improved the ecosystem for the leeches while making it worse for the big fish.
I cannot imagine the motivation for replacing original content with rewritten news. Sure, there’s the usual crying in the beer talk — corporations have contempt for audiences, absurd profit expectations, an unseemly fetish for cost cutting, a sense of resigned desperation — but the idea of using Demand content is so breathtakingly, mind-numbingly, jaw-droppingly shortsighted that I have to believe I’m missing something.
It takes about three seconds of introspection to see that if the number of parasites keeps growing and the number of hosts keeps shrinking, the news ecosystem will eventually collapse. It’s as though the Trojans, knowing the horse was full of Greeks, decided to accept it anyway.
The hope thing
Like a lot of news people I keep hoping that the business will find a bottom, that bean counters will realize that they are in a downward spiral where cuts fuel audience loss and audience loss fuels cuts…. The elevation of a content farm like Demand Studios undermines that hope. It reinforces the idea that short-term thinking will continue to trump the long-term health of the industry until someone invents the next big thing.
Contempt?
The whole notion of using non-original content smacks of contempt for audiences and managerial arrogance.
Years ago newspapers and TV stations shuttered bureaus, arguing that audiences can’t tell the difference between a story written by a local reporter and one created by a wire service. (The sleight of hand being that the wires rarely cover your local politicians.)
I sense that same logic at play here, that somewhere in the stratosphere of corporate headquarters, someone calculated that readers can’t tell the difference between stories from a copy mill and those from a dedicated reporter; that they won’t notice if the content is built with the same information available a dozen other places — that they aren’t all that bright.
The contempt doesn’t just fall on the audience; advertisers get a dose, too. Part of what advertisers pay for is a share of the news outlet’s credibility, its good will with its audience. Satisfied audiences, those that read the whole article or stay on the Web page, are more likely to see the ads.
Crappy content means flagging user loyalty, a lack of stickiness, and inconsistent good will.
Consider the following thought experiment: A manager receives resumes from two equally-qualified candidates. The manager can only interview one of them. The only difference between the applicants is that Candidate Two’s resume is wrinkled and smudged. Who gets the interview?
Whether the decision to reject the candidate with the flawed resume is conscious or unconscious, it is clear that the quality of the presentation matters at some level. The user experience is not just about facts; there’s a section in every resume writing book reminding us of this idea. Where’s a logical leap when you need one?
It could be worse
Demand isn’t an isolated company in the content game, or even the worst. By many standards, Demand Studios is a Garden of Eden for modern writers.
The next time you’re searching job sites, try the keywords, “rewriter,” “rewrite,” or “rewriting.” You’ll find dozens of companies looking for people to translate content so it passes a plagiarism test and performs well in search engines. Some of that content ends up going to scores of sites that serve no other purpose than to rack up page views and generate money from CPM ad views. Those companies offer $1 to $5 per article and ask writers for several 300- to 500-word articles per week.
Things could get ugly if a lot of advertisers discover they’re paying for ads that at best don’t get seen or, worse, become associated with poor content sites. It’s the flip side of borrowing the content provider’s credibility.
* I can’t tell you how much Demand Studio pays without risking violating their rules, but I can fairly say that I’d have to write 25 Demand Studios articles to make the same amount of money I made for a single freelance piece in City Pages (a Village Voice sister paper) in the mid 1990s. Also, selling plasma has a significantly better per-hour rate.
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August 11th, 2010 @ 11:50 PM
I think it’s sad to see reputable papers falling by the way of cheap content.Especially when there are so many talented writers out there who would be willing to do the work the right way.