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The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

wired.com

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Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#21

Post by 10ren »

jordanb wrote: post #12

The implications of this article are depressing. While I usually keep a tiny violin handy for when I run across writers bemoaning the death of journalism, the bleakness of an Internet full of crappy howto videos busted out for $20 a pop has gotten to me. We already have far too much slapdash, zero effort link-baiting blog drivel. But the worst part is the Orwellian (or perhaps Huxley-ian?) idea of all those people be…

Just BTW: Regarding the time to prepare the article itself, it's standard practice for companies to send press releases to magazines/articles that are already ready for publication as is. It makes sense: they will benefit massively from the publicity, and they have the best access to the material. Who knows, in this case they may even have included the "too slick" passage for verisimilitude (with an ironic wink). Most probably, wired did extra work, and just used the press release as a base. I'm just saying that that base reduces the work they had to do.

In the long term, quality will improve, in tiny marginal steps. The company already talks about that extra $1 for fact checking; but if another company is doing the same thing, and starts ranking higher, there will be pressure to increase quality. (That is, assuming the ad-clicks are worth fighting for...)

It occurs to me that Google's pagerank is out of date: today, few people will add a link to their webpage/blog to one of these $20 videos, so pagerank can't rank them using links. (this isn't a danger to google; and their algorithm already uses many factors other than links). It would be a valuable to rank them somehow, using the behaviour of users. How to do that?

Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#22

Post by greyman »

blhack wrote: post #10

Eek... Reading this article was like watching a nightmare become reality. I've been getting thrown into ehow.com quite a bit lately, now I know why the answers are so terrible. This sort of mathematical approach to maximizing profit is, to me, a cancer on the web. The analogy in the article was perfect, they're like the kid that screamed out the answer to every question the teacher had, but with absolutely 0 insight.

As I understand it, the mathematics approach is for finding questions, and I don't think there is something inherently nightmarish about that. It's the quality of the answer that matters. I don't know, I just watched the "What is the best vodka?" video, and being an amateur in this area, I actually found it quite useful.

Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#23

Post by greyman »

jordanb wrote: post #12

The implications of this article are depressing. While I usually keep a tiny violin handy for when I run across writers bemoaning the death of journalism, the bleakness of an Internet full of crappy howto videos busted out for $20 a pop has gotten to me. We already have far too much slapdash, zero effort link-baiting blog drivel. But the worst part is the Orwellian (or perhaps Huxley-ian?) idea of all those people be…

What is depressing is that Google likes that kind of content, when a lot of cheap articles are pumped in furiously. If they were after quality, they could de-rank Demand and that would make them out of business quickly. But they wouldn't do it, since advertising dollars are at stake.

But on the other side, it isn't that terribly depressing, since their site will occupy only one slot in the search results. So it is still a chance for others to come up with better content for such keywords. But as it seems, it is inevitable for online media producers to play the keyword game.

Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#24

Post by petercooper »

10ren wrote: post #21
jordanb wrote: post #12

The implications of this article are depressing. While I usually keep a tiny violin handy for when I run across writers bemoaning the death of journalism, the bleakness of an Internet full of crappy howto videos busted out for $20 a pop has gotten to me. We already have far too much slapdash, zero effort link-baiting blog drivel. But the worst part is the Orwellian (or perhaps Huxley-ian?) idea of all those people be…

Just BTW: Regarding the time to prepare the article itself, it's standard practice for companies to send press releases to magazines/articles that are already ready for publication as is . It makes sense: they will benefit massively from the publicity, and they have the best access to the material. Who knows, in this case they may even have included the "too slick" passage for verisimilitude (with an ironic wink). Mo…

It would be a valuable to rank them somehow, using the behaviour of users. How to do that?

I'd be surprised if Google wasn't using Analytics to do that for many of the sites that use it.

Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#25

Post by petercooper »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #15

> This, Reese says, is the ultimate promise of his algorithm: “You can take something that is thought of as a creative process and turn it into a manufacturing process.” That scares the shit out of me.

If it continues, this is what all music will sound like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E

Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#26

Post by petercooper »

brandnewlow wrote: post #13

I told a bunch of journalism friends about this over beers tonight. A few of them were really depressed by this. 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 ab…

While the lack of a strong editorial voice can be a negative, the pay surely isn't. As you note, $50 a pop for "short posts." For someone who's skilled in an area (as most Weblogs Inc writers were, at least) $50 to put out a 300-400 word post in 30 minutes or so is pretty good pay.

Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#27

Post by shib71 »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #16
jf wrote: post #4

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 “…

It's crap. Just take a look at eHow.com and judge for yourself.

Howcast actually seems fairly good.

I'm optimistic about eHow (and the rest of those). A mining company is happy to get 6 grams of gold out of a ton of ore. The world's internet community will collectively sift through the sewage looking for good content, and pagerank / Twitter will bring it to the rest of us.

Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#28

Post by philk »

There are some cool elements to this system - the algorithm for determining what content to create and the ambition of the founder but overall the system seems to be designed to produce the video equivalent of sludge.

Incentives are structured so that quality, in-depth content will be penalised while terrible, quick to produce movies will be rewarded highly. The only check on the terrible videos is the fact checking process but if you think you're going to get any kind of quality fact checking for a dollar then I have a bridge to sell you.

Given the rewards are much higher for the latter kind of video, these videos are going to grow to dominate the service. The producers of these will make videos about anything they can, not anything that corresponds to their field of expertise so essentially all you'll be getting (at best) is educated guesses about your topic of choice.

In fact there's probably a nonzero amount of money to be made in creating an automatic video generator which automatically composits videos and submits them under various names; remembering, of course; that it doesn't have to have actual information, it just needs to be good enough to get past the dollar per video filter.

The internet doesn't suffer from a shortage of information (we're already drowning in it); it suffers a shortage of quality. I can't see this doing anything to solve that.

That said, perhaps there's a market for sludge. If people want a few factoids about 'the best vodka' or something else that's utterly irrelevant, well maybe this will satisfy that demand. At least it's doing it cheaply.

Finally on an unrelated note this seems to be video for videos sake. Unless there's something being conveyed in the video that can't be done easily in text (for example recordings of the Dean Kamen robotic arm) I'd much rather stick to text - it's faster to consume, easier to parse and much more in depth.

Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#29

Post by forensic »

While it is a bit of a race to the bottom, it doesn't have to be.

Especially if you include the PG-style democratic effect, where the good eHow articles float to the top and the bad sink, which creates a feedback loop that rewards quality. As quality becomes more important, the eHow statistical analysis will demonstrate that and eHow will adjust the process to increase quality.

Alternatively, they might just stick to such simple topics that this is unnecessary. "How to Be Popular" is not a simple topic, but "How to Use a Can Opener" is. Using a can opener is a useful thing to have available and doesn't need expensive production values.

Over time, if the business is truly data-driven, it should adjust to reflect these realities and lend itself to fulfilling true human needs, not just yelling the loudest for short term profit.

Re: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

#30

Post by wallflower »

jordanb wrote: post #12

The implications of this article are depressing. While I usually keep a tiny violin handy for when I run across writers bemoaning the death of journalism, the bleakness of an Internet full of crappy howto videos busted out for $20 a pop has gotten to me. We already have far too much slapdash, zero effort link-baiting blog drivel. But the worst part is the Orwellian (or perhaps Huxley-ian?) idea of all those people be…

"It's oft pitched as Wired readers, only about a decade younger (Wired is an extremely well loved brand by advertisers)." -kn0thing

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=906830

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