
The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell - chuck_taylor
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/
======
jordanb
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 being driven to satisfy the demands of an
algorithm on tiny margins, because it makes me feel somewhat culpable as a web
programmer with an interest in statistics.

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.

~~~
10ren
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?

~~~
chuck_taylor
Most likely Wired didn't do anything based on a press release. The P.R.
industry would like you to believe they are able to drive the news agenda, but
when it comes to the Wireds and The New York Timeses of the world, it's rare
for a press release to lead to a story of this magnitude.

Most likely, Demand Studios' P.R. people freaked out when Wired inquired.

This story likely took weeks to report and write. A graphic artist probably
spent at least a week preparing the chart. Good journalism takes a lot of
effort, and so few people realize that.

As someone who has been paid to write and edit news for 30 years, this article
was pretty depressing, but I already knew about Demand Studios. And you know
what? It looks like they take good care of their writers, at least in the
karma department. These seem to be folks who have always wanted to be paid to
write but never had the opportunity to get paid for it, enjoy surfing the Web,
and can bang out three or four of these articles in a day and have some good
walking-around-money.

They seem to be mostly American, but at some point I'm sure the Third World
will be recruited to drive the price down even further. Seen what they are
paying on Mechanical Turk?

~~~
10ren
I wonder if we'll ever know, factually, who wrote to whom first?

I don't mean to slight wired; but I'm sure that many technology companies
would like to be covered by wired, and if they have any sense, they'd prepare
an article in the most convenient form for wired, and send it to them - and
the guy running Demand definitely knows how to make things happen at this
point. They wouldn't have any control over what Wired did with it, of course.

I wouldn't worry about it too much - it's just a drop in the ocean, and there
are lots of other sources of information on the web. Probably, it's fair to
say that having a crappy $20 video is quite a bit better than nothing. And if
there's a few results to a google search, most people will look at more than
one.

Example: I had a blocked toilet yesterday, google came up with a several
excellent hits on it. I tried the suggestions in order, and problem solved.
The internet is pretty cool.

I guess the depressing part is that higher quality can't be supported by
_adwords_ alone - it would _seem_ , anyway. I think quality is often best
rewarded in niches audiences and uses, where quality really matters.

~~~
chuck_taylor
I think you mean AdSense. AdWords are a way for content creators to
<i>spend</i> money, not make it.

In any event, AdSense revenue is trivial compared to the cost of creating
content that has any widespread impact.

------
blhack
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.

~~~
greyman
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.

------
wallflower
I hope this doesn't get buried. Fascinating article about how a media company
is scaling itself in real-time (by analyzing over 100 high-value sources of
what people are searching for) and algorithmically determining what obscure
piece of content will generate a lifetime profit (at 55 to 60 cents per
adsense click). They match the costs of production to the expected life-time
profit, for example $15 for a few-hundred word article (fully acknowledging
that most content on the Internet is cheap)

------
modeless
_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.

~~~
noaharc
Interesting excerpt. But isn't Murdoch actually something of an "upstart" in
media, who himself has been viewed as corrupting the journalistic standards of
yesterday?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Beginnings>

------
snewe
Full page:

<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1>

------
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.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Whoa, there. They _do_ look at the data, and do what the data tell them makes
the most sense. That's what that means. You can't say that you would do what
your analysis tells you is right, and then decide what you'll conclude in
advance!

Also, you might have noticed that the "democratic" parts of the web are mostly
terrible.

~~~
forensic
What I'm saying is that the quality-effect would take time to become
prominent.

First they have to profit off all the low-hanging fruit simply because there
is no competition.

Then, once competition starts to build up, there is no more low-hanging fruit
left and they are forced to compete on quality.

Over time, a democratic effect takes place and quality rises.

There is a difference between saying, "Cat pics are more popular than
articles" and saying, " _This_ eHow video is higher quality than _this_ other
site's HowTo video"

Cat pics don't compete with articles except on reddit and digg which love to
compare apples and oranges. In a google search though, they are totally
separate. So yeah maybe eHow will make 10 times more cat pics than informed
videos but the point is that the cat pics will be automatically filtered out
unless you search for "cat pics".

------
barmstrong
I'm skeptical of this type of business, simply for the reason that I think you
have to actually help people to make money. You can trick them in the short
term or exploit some discrepancy, but this doesn't sound much different than
spam, so I can't imagine it being successful long term.

------
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.

------
brandnewlow
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
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.

~~~
petercooper
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.

~~~
chuck_taylor
Word count is not an indication of the effort involved. Itg's not merely a
matter of typing in words like a monkey. You have to know about which you
write. The more you know, likely the more time it took you to learn it. Time
is money, words are just words.

~~~
petercooper
_Word count is not an indication of the effort involved._

If it's for writing small news bits, it can be. Let's say you're a total
expert with using GMail and you have to write a couple of posts linking to
GMail news, the occasional tip, etc, each day - you can probably bash short
posts out in no time.

You have the many hundreds of hours invested in actually become the expert in
the first place, but I doubt anyone becomes an expert _so_ they can write $50
a pop pieces - so that cash is extra value, not a payback for the time you
spent learning (as is the case with a professional's fees).

~~~
chuck_taylor
Well, OK, but that's an awfully narrow example. What happens when you are
asked, or want, to write of something about which you know only a little? Or
something you sort of know well but which requires a modest degree of fact-
checking and verification?

Put another way, how much do you expect to earn per hour for this sort of
work? How long does it take you to write an informative 300 words?

------
bengebre
It's the new domain squatting (kinda). Content producers are laying claim to
keywords/searches that are under served but provide questionable value to
those that they seek to reach.

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.

------
10ren
This is at the same time really cool and horrific.

------
billjings
This is the modern information economy equivalent of a manic episode.

------
paraschopra
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?

~~~
brandnewlow
Machine-generated sports stories via Northwestern's CS department:
[http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/innovation/page.aspx?id=1...](http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/innovation/page.aspx?id=134675)

------
jf
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 “How
to Make Friends at a New School” includes such useful tidbits as “sit in the
middle of the classroom to surround yourself with as many potential new
friends as possible.” Demand-owned eHow’s “How to Be Popular in School” video,
in contrast, offers such vague guidance as “be nice to everybody.”)"

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

~~~
shib71
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.

------
GeneralMaximus
> _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.

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

------
whatusername
See the previous discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=892290>

------
fmw
A similar, though less automated and small scale, variant of this scheme was
discussed some time ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511935>

