11–20 of 42 posts
Maybe eHow articles could serve as a flag to better content producers that moderately valuable yet under served "real estate" exists in a space. They might then claim some of that revenue by targeting the topic and providing higher quality content.
But then I observed that I was reading a more than 3000 word article, one which includes several interviews (with at least one on-site). And I wondered: is Wired itself a dinosaur? It's still apparently paying for pretty high journalistic standards. I imagine this article would have taken at least a few days to file, and presumably cost thousands of dollars. Why hasn't Wired figured out that the way to make money in online Journalism is to rip out dozens of 100 word articles per writer per day, consisting of facts plagiarized from others, with a few pithy statements and a linkbait title?
It's like Wired is some nostalgic holdover from the heady days of the print magazine, when they had people like Gibson and Stevenson writing grandiose, timeless (if a bit naive) articles on the coming digital wonderland. It made me want to search into Wired's archive and re-read Mother Earth Motherboard for the umpteenth time -- perhaps before Wired folds like the other dinosaurs and takes its archive with it. But then it occurred to me: the fact that I could, on a whim, pull up an article that was published in an ephemeral magazine more than a decade ago is itself a result of the Internet.
When that article was originally published, Wired's entire opportunity to make back the commission it paid was the shelf life of the issue in which it was printed. After that it would have spent perhaps a few years in library periodical departments, and would have eventually ended up on microfilm in archives, available to those who know the issue and volume number. I would have only been able to access their back catalog with great effort, and their ability to make money off of my doing so would have been nonexistent.
But now Wired's entire catalog is available online -- years and years of articles. And they all have fresh, revenue yielding advertisements around them. I think about how much time I've spent in Wired's archives. Just a few weeks ago I read a huge article about Project Xanadu that made the rounds. If you look at the link-broker sites like news.ycombinator, there is a good deal of blogspam -- no doubt -- but just yesterday there was a Dijkstra essay from the 1980s. It makes me think that perhaps there is a market for quality on the Internet. It's just hidden, because the quality isn't rewarded upfront by the initial wave of attention, but by the slow, slow trickle of back-issue readership -- still producing impressions on articles written and paid for many years ago.
One of them is actually on the margins of it. He just started writing for an AOL site and said that this is the direction they're going to start going with for their weblogs inc. sites. He gets a list of topics culled from Google Zietgeist and other sources that his editor wants him to write short posts about for $50/pop. They don't really care what he writes so long as they have content available on the topics that people are searching for right now.
This is the world that's been built.
All hell will break loose when algorithms start writing these articles, imagine information just getting recycled with no new information conveyed. Of course, algorithms could detect correlations and patterns in text but would they be able to produce original and genuinely interesting articles?
That scares the shit out of me.
I'm cautiously excited, but am withholding judgement until I see the quality of their products: From the article: "Howcast, one of Demand’s largest competitors, also produces explainer videos and how-tos. Unlike Demand, the company employs a staff of editors and writers and gets freelance voice-over pros. Filmmakers can earn a couple thousand dollars shooting the videos, and the difference is noticeable. (Howcast’s “…
All hell will break loose when algorithms start writing these articles, imagine information just getting recycled with no new information conveyed. Of course, algorithms could detect correlations and patterns in text but would they be able to produce original and genuinely interesting articles?
Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value. This is the reality that Rupert Murdoch is trying his best to ignore.