I haven't done it in a long time (thank heavens), but I used to write a lot of garbage as a way to afford vagabonding around China and generally avoiding real life. I would get paid $10 for 500 words of utter garbage, mostly for SEO purposes. It could be about almost anything, it just had to be well-written (no grammar errors), include a smattering of keywords in very specific locations, and had to meet a length requirement.
Eventually I started outsourcing my writing to stay-at-home moms with English degrees and one of my friends who would trip on acid and pound out three articles an hour.
On the surface it was good money; writing comes naturally to me and I could easily make $30/hour, which was good money for someone sitting on a train in China. But eventually it starts to wear on you. Especially knowing that you're not providing any real value and your entire purpose is basically to trick an algorithm, it just burns you out very quickly.
It's still not ideal for quality content, but at least now the algorithm we're all trying to trick is a mostly human one. I hate Buzzfeed clickbait as much as the next person, but it's still better than filling up the Internet with endless spam.
In the early years of my site, I would have people submit photos of offices to be published and then I'd riff on them for a few hundred words and add a title of "X Company's Amazing NYC Offices".
It all started sounding the same after hundreds of posts so I began requiring the architects to submit a brief explaining the project and found that what they wrote was 1000% more valuable that anything I could write. Post titles changed from being clickbaity fluff to 'Company Name - Location'. Instead of the actual content portion being the value I'm trying to add personally, my goal has been to have the value be in my curation skills.
Now that I've been at it for a long time, I can add value in other ways like adding new tools for readers to interact with the content as well as writing high-level trend pieces on what I'm seeing in the industry.
The photos are taken by the architect or designer who have permission to share/publish them. They are oftwn taken after the construction is completed and before the company moves in fully.
That said there are many office design projects which are not allowed to be published and are photographed for internal use only.
Just like the ecosystem and the economy and any other system, it's all about feedback loops.
Unfortunately the web today is dominated by a very sick feedback loop driven by perverse incentives. You were being paid to write garbage. You and whoever paid you profited by that. Clearly the incentives are wrong and the invisible hand of the free market is no where to be seen. Why? Because the free market works when consumers are the customers. Not when we are the product.
This isn't unique to the internet. Reality TV, radio soaps, and other fluff content are all created to fill voids in the entertainment space and garner eyeballs. The difference is that the internet is almost infinitely scalable, and there is much more space to fill. Walled gardens, powerful search algorithms, aggregators, and other tools spring up to help consumers sort through the noise.
I started out playing with eBay searches to be able to flip stuff (made really, really good money). That turned into SEO, but I didn't want to do "full stack" SEO and thought I wanted to be a writer. I'm not sure it's around or necessary anymore; Google is a little bit smarter. Now it's more manipulating social or creating linkbait.
Eventually I started outsourcing my writing to stay-at-home moms with English degrees and one of my friends who would trip on acid and pound out three articles an hour.
On the surface it was good money; writing comes naturally to me and I could easily make $30/hour, which was good money for someone sitting on a train in China. But eventually it starts to wear on you. Especially knowing that you're not providing any real value and your entire purpose is basically to trick an algorithm, it just burns you out very quickly.
It's still not ideal for quality content, but at least now the algorithm we're all trying to trick is a mostly human one. I hate Buzzfeed clickbait as much as the next person, but it's still better than filling up the Internet with endless spam.