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Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

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Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#31

Post by fleitz »

japherwocky wrote: post #17
patio11 wrote: post #16

You shouldn’t put your ads next to sub-par content. We will not make content unless we have an expert. Demand Media will make content if someone will take $10 I don't relish paying people for what are essentially search clicks that in an ideal world I would have outranked them for, but the alternative is not paying and getting no sale. Case in point: I paid $100 for ads on eHow in January alone. (Of which something l…

maybe he wants a truce because he's losing?

Yeah, text is what content farmers were growing last year. This year it's video. Apparently, youtube has gone unfarmed for far too long. The real answer to this question is that google doesn't have tech yet to defeat video farming.

If you really think about it what one SHOULD do is create a content futures exchange. An electronic exchange that uses APIs to shop a piece of content around and with a futures market you can sell the content for when it's needed, so you can buy christmas content in June at a discount. If it works for corn it can work for content. Also once the exchange is live you can start selling copies of your FREE "Content Farmers Almanac Ebook" all you need to do is enter your email address so the freshly farmed content can be delivered right to your door.

"I'd like 2 free range articles and 5 organic videos a week"

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#32

Post by [deleted] »

patio11 wrote: post #16

You shouldn’t put your ads next to sub-par content. We will not make content unless we have an expert. Demand Media will make content if someone will take $10 I don't relish paying people for what are essentially search clicks that in an ideal world I would have outranked them for, but the alternative is not paying and getting no sale. Case in point: I paid $100 for ads on eHow in January alone. (Of which something l…

[deleted]

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#33

Post by jasonmcalacanis »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #10

I'm not sure this "We spent SIX MILLION DOLLARS on our how to bathe a Zebra page!" nonsense is really going to work. The problem here is that folks want to know stuff that has very little -- but measurable -- value in terms of advertising dollars. You are not going to make Champagne pages for folks with beer budgets. Doesn't make sense. More honestly, this is an issue of making Google look bad. It's the Deadly Sin of…

Google is not fair today--that's the problem!

ehow is an 11 year old domain name and they create millions of pages. They will out rank anyone due to:

a) domain age b) flooding the index with dozens of pages around a niche topic (as opposed to one good one).

google does NOT rank for quality... it ranks for signs of quality such as domain age, inbound links, etc.

until google can tell that there 100+ spam articles on a niche topic are not as good as on lifehacker or Mahalo or /. page we're screwed.

I mean, in order to win you need to buy and old domain and flood the index. what if everyone does this?!?!

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#34

Post by tptacek »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #33
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #10

I'm not sure this "We spent SIX MILLION DOLLARS on our how to bathe a Zebra page!" nonsense is really going to work. The problem here is that folks want to know stuff that has very little -- but measurable -- value in terms of advertising dollars. You are not going to make Champagne pages for folks with beer budgets. Doesn't make sense. More honestly, this is an issue of making Google look bad. It's the Deadly Sin of…

Google is not fair today--that's the problem! ehow is an 11 year old domain name and they create millions of pages. They will out rank anyone due to: a) domain age b) flooding the index with dozens of pages around a niche topic (as opposed to one good one). google does NOT rank for quality... it ranks for signs of quality such as domain age, inbound links, etc. until google can tell that there 100+ spam articles on a…

This eHow page was written by a human being and convincingly answers a (trivial) question:

http://www.ehow.com/how_13856_play-valentine-bingo.html

This Mahalo page was written by a sloppy computer program and is a shotgun blast of random gronk schlorped on a page in the hopes of making it appear to answer a question that nobody, even at Mahalo, really thought about:

http://www.mahalo.com/christmas-bingo/

If Google is bonusing up the owner of the former page to the detriment of the owner of the latter page, they're doing the Internet a favor. My only knock on them is that their response to the latter page didn't involve blowtorches.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#35

Post by aphyr »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #25
aphyr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, Jason, this is the only time I've found myself agreeing with you. Mahalo was a low SNR, spam-driven, visually abhorrent, search-result-polluting pile of useless self-referential scraped-off-wikipedia bullshit that I wanted to burn to the ground so badly that I wrote code to excise it from search results before its inchoate content managed to scream dimly from somewhere below two folds worth of weight loss a…

Thanks pal. Frankly, I think we got caught up in the races with content farms like Demand Media too much. You can't create thousands of articles a day and expect quality--it's impossible!!! So, we move to dozens to maybe 200 pages a day... but we do it with quality and hope for the best. The good news is we broken even last year and have a ton of money in the bank. We are going to ramp up our burn and try to make a L…

We are going to build a wide, commercial version of the Kahn Academy.

This is a terrific idea, and I wish you all the best in doing it well. You've got the drive, money, and PR skill to make it a reality. Go for it.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#36

Post by SwellJoe »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #10

I'm not sure this "We spent SIX MILLION DOLLARS on our how to bathe a Zebra page!" nonsense is really going to work. The problem here is that folks want to know stuff that has very little -- but measurable -- value in terms of advertising dollars. You are not going to make Champagne pages for folks with beer budgets. Doesn't make sense. More honestly, this is an issue of making Google look bad. It's the Deadly Sin of…

"a net full of cool, informative, and deep articles about just about every subject imaginable. That's a noble goal -- but in my opinion you have to crawl before you can walk. Shutting these guys down isn't going to do much except stifle innovation."

The Internet is a net full of cool, informative, and deep articles about just about every subject imaginable. The content farms are not where you find them, and they're getting in the way of the quality results.

The fact that eHow shows up, at all, in Google listings, is a failure of Google on an epic scale. There are always better sources for any given topic than eHow (or Mahalo, except maybe on cooking a turkey).

Killing content farms by blacklisting them from Google would not stifle innovation, it would allow the the quality content to rise to the top, as it should. The best content on any given niche subject is usually found on a tiny niche site run by someone that loves their subject. Google punishes tiny niche sites, comparatively speaking, despite the fact that they are better for niche subjects. And, it rewards big-ass content farms like eHow, despite the fact that 99.9% of their content is literally worthless.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#38

Post by j_baker »

FiddlerClamp wrote: post #30
j_baker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... Yes. If the soup is shared by two billion people, and a few of them are dropping tens of thousands of tons of salt a day, I think one can be forgiven for asking them to quit. Nor do I see anything wrong with one of them realizing what they're doing, stopping, and asking other people to stop too.

Right around the time when Google has stated it's going to clamp down on it, too!

So? What's your point? I mean, Calcanis was clear that he felt that this was the best business decision. Does the fact that he's doing it to make more money make it any less a good thing?

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#39

Post by a5seo »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #22
patio11 wrote: post #16

You shouldn’t put your ads next to sub-par content. We will not make content unless we have an expert. Demand Media will make content if someone will take $10 I don't relish paying people for what are essentially search clicks that in an ideal world I would have outranked them for, but the alternative is not paying and getting no sale. Case in point: I paid $100 for ads on eHow in January alone. (Of which something l…

VIDEO is our answer. We have been moving all of our content to a higher standard: 1. video 2. an EXPERT in the video with credentials 3. quality Q&A (with some paid folks answers questions... that we don't really promote) best jason

ExpertVillage, developed the content farm video strategy, like 6 years ago... Almost exactly as you describe.

Guess who founded that: Byron Reese the brains behind Demand Media's entire content algo system. http://www.demandmedia.com/executive-leadership/byron-reese/

So unfortunately, this isn't some new idea Demand missed... it's one they've moved beyond.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#40

Post by [deleted] »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #22
patio11 wrote: post #16

You shouldn’t put your ads next to sub-par content. We will not make content unless we have an expert. Demand Media will make content if someone will take $10 I don't relish paying people for what are essentially search clicks that in an ideal world I would have outranked them for, but the alternative is not paying and getting no sale. Case in point: I paid $100 for ads on eHow in January alone. (Of which something l…

VIDEO is our answer. We have been moving all of our content to a higher standard: 1. video 2. an EXPERT in the video with credentials 3. quality Q&A (with some paid folks answers questions... that we don't really promote) best jason

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