

The end of hand crafted content - cwan
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/13/the-end-of-hand-crafted-content/

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patio11
It isn't the end of hand crafted content -- it puts a heck of a squeeze on the
middle of the quality curve, though.

Demand Media et al compete for more phrases versus me than my _actual
competitors_ do, simply because they are virtually guaranteed to have a piece
which is laser targeted at a query like [how do i make a bingo card]. In a
perfect world, I'd like to rank for that query, rather than having to pay eHow
for an AdSense click about it.

I have, nonetheless, paid over $20 over the past year for clicks on ads on
this page:

<http://www.ehow.com/how_2120747_make-bingo-cards.html>

Demand Media's entire business model is that that page cost them $4 to create.
They keep half of what I pay Google, so they're ahead quite a bit on that page
-- and there are other advertisers than me with ads there.

My strategy for competing with this, such that it is, is to go for depth over
breadth, do a bit of the outsourcing thing myself, and compensate for my
comparative lack of scale with focused use of programming. I pretty much can't
outrank eHow for "How to X" questions in a systematically economic manner. I
can, however, outpublish them regarding actual bingo cards which, since it is
what the customer _actually wants_ , tend to get the links and build the self-
reinforcing authority.

For those of us who are at least partially in the publishing business (and I
really am at least partially in the publishing business by dint of my SEO
strategy), you have to have some idea of how you're going to compete on the
long tail versus mass amounts of textually unique garbage backed up by
impressive domain authority. At least until Google brings the hammer down on
them. (Honestly, that Wired piece would have made me very uneasy if I were
working for them. Google doesn't mind people doing SEO, but SEO which scales
algorithmically pisses them off like you wouldn't believe. That is practically
their working definition for black hat.)

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russell
I dont think so. Sure, the signal to noise ratio is declining on the web, but
we dont have to depend on Google to deliver things that interest us. I think
HN is a reasonable model for a filter. Sturgeon's Law certainly applies here,
but I manage to find a few posts that follow my interests. Most of the time
the comments are more relevant than the link.

HN is really crowd source editing with a very high level of participants. I
dont see any sign that purely statistical aggregation is going to cut the
mustard soon.

~~~
NathanKP
I completely agree. People will simply adapt and find new ways to locate
quality, original content. If HN-like sites are the solution they will take
over. If not someone else will come up with a solution.

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3pt14159
Echoing the other views around here:

The internet is giving rise to even _better_ hand crafted content, not worse.
Pick up any newspaper printed at any time and compare the entire thing (every
section, every page) to the entire first couple pages of Hacker News links. It
doesn't even come close. Most newspaper articles are pure drivel and ridden
with ads, while the front page of HN has incredibly well written views on
markets, business, technology, finance, etc... One of my favorite sites of all
time is dustincurtis.com, a guy so far from cramming out a McDonalds article a
day that it is silly.

~~~
pixelmonkey
I agree with you. I think the quantity of craft content has exploded in recent
years, with the rise of blogging and with digital content sites displacing
traditional media. However, as a proportion of total Internet content, yes,
McDonalds content may dominate the pie chart.

I contrast the stuff I regularly read on two of my favorite online (non-tech)
content sites, Salon.com and OpenSalon.com, to something like AOL.com's
homepage and many of the blogs @ Xanga.com, and I notice a considerable
difference in craft. But that doesn't mean the craft stuff isn't out there --
and in much greater quantity than ever before.

That's basically my rule for the web. The average quality of everything on the
web is low, but total absolute quantity of high-quality content is higher than
the world before the web. That's part of the reason I built my startup,
<http://parse.ly> \-- to help people find the good stuff based on their own
personal interests.

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henning
You certainly will be subjected to shitty McDonalds-type content if you keep
reading TechCrunch.

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ajju
I think good filters, in search engines and at the users' end will make it
really hard for mediocre and bad autogenerated content to ever compete with
good hand crafted content.

Autogenerated content, for example, will never be able to replicate the snark
of TechCrunch or the gossipy tone of Valleywag very effectively. If they ever
come close, they will still need primary sources of information.

~~~
chronomex
The content that they're talking about (articles on ehow.com and friends) are
generated by Mechanical Turk or some similar arrangement, not by Markov
chainers! But I'm sure they'll jump on autogeneration as soon as they possibly
can.

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bmalicoat
I didn't really understand this article. My interpretation was all of these
spammy sites that steal and scrape content will overtake all of those that
actually produce things. But the spammy sites still need to get their content
somewhere and finding the content's original source can't be too hard. Or did
I totally miss the point?

~~~
henrikschroder
He's saying that the mass-produced crap "content" sites will all dominate the
search result listings and push all the quality content sites out of business
because noone will visit them.

But we're not using search engines to get to every place on the web. We learn
where the quality content is, we don't rely on generic portals for news and
articles. We learn which blogs are good. We get sites recommended by our
friends. We find sites and bookmark them and revisit if they're good.

~~~
mattmcknight
He still has the old school media mindset that the scoop is the important
thing, and he wants respect for being the first one to find out something. Of
course, the fact that he's a prime source for the echo chamber means things
seem like they have more sources than they do.

