The algorithm, like a drunken prophet, starts spitting out phrase after phrase: “butterfly cake,” “shin splints,” “Harley-Davidson belt buckles.”
Once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.
The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model | Wired Magazine (via Zeldman)
Fascinating piece in Wired about Demand Media, a company that is paying freelancers at most $20 for the creation of low-quality how-to content and running it lucratively against Google ads. By next year they will be producing one million pieces of content a year at a cost of $200 million, a fraction of what the NYT pays their journalists.
The most interesting part is that they’re, in a way, legally gaming Google by determining what to write about algorithmically, based on what people are searching for, how high they can appear in search results, and how much the ads will generate over the lifetime of the article.
