{"id":38083,"date":"2011-02-26T01:04:34","date_gmt":"2011-02-26T09:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=10115"},"modified":"2011-02-26T01:04:34","modified_gmt":"2011-02-26T09:04:34","slug":"%e2%80%9ccontent-farms%e2%80%9d-and-the-media-precambrian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/02\/26\/%e2%80%9ccontent-farms%e2%80%9d-and-the-media-precambrian\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cContent farms\u201d and the media Precambrian"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve only become aware of &#8220;content farms&#8221; in any significant way over the past few days. Yes, I&#8217;m aware of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.associatedcontent.com\/\">Associated Content<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ehow.com\/\">eHow<\/a>. I use Google! But I&#8217;ve always ignored them. But with Google&#8217;s turn <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/epicenter\/2011\/02\/google-clamp-down-content-factories\">against these websites<\/a> I&#8217;ve become curious.  This <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/magazine\/2009\/10\/ff_demandmedia\/\">Wired<\/a> piece from October 2009 is a gem. Here&#8217;s the part that caught my attention:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Plenty of other companies \u2014 About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com \u2014 have tried to corner the market in arcane online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. <b>Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.<\/b>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In some ways &#8220;mainstream&#8221; websites also do this a bit, Nick Denton relies on fine-grained metrics for his <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gawker_Media\">Gawker Media<\/a> properties. But obviously the sort of thing that content farms do, responding so specifically to the interests of the audience, take it to the next level. I started browsing some of the &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve only become aware of &#8220;content farms&#8221; in any significant way over the past few days. Yes, I&#8217;m aware of Associated Content and eHow. I use Google! But I&#8217;ve always ignored them. But with Google&#8217;s turn against these&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38083"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38447,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38083\/revisions\/38447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}