Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and how the tech area for today's text stuff tidbits. That's the new thing I'm doing on Wednesdays where I do a shorter topic. I thought I would talk a little bit about content farms and click bait, and I think of these as kind of like cousins. So we'll start with the concept of content farms. Now, to understand how content farms became a thing, it's necessary to talk about web advertising and search engines because those are the two components that made content farms a viable business idea. So here's the super short version of web advertising. Obviously, it involves making deal with some sort of advertising entity where that entity will give you money in exchange for allowing the entity to put up advertising on your site in some way. Now, usually that money is actually contingent upon some other criteria, not just that you allow them to take up landscape, because that's just not good enough. If no one ever goes to your web page, then the ad is doing nothing. It's it's like if you put a billboard up in the middle of the Sahara desert where nobody goes. So web advertising quickly adopted a few different models, and I'll give a few examples. So one was just based on page views, so the advertiser would get data about how many people had visited that web page in a given amount of time, and they might also get a little more data such as, you know, how much time the average person spent on the page. And generally speaking, the more people who visit, the longer that they stay on a page, the more valuable the page is uh and the more likely they are, obviously to encounter or even perhaps act upon advertising. So you've got a lot of different concepts wrapped up in here. You would typically have a uh, you know, a per thousand deal for views. So you might say like, okay, well we'll pay you five dollars per thousand views this web page gets, because that means one thousand times people saw are at You also had the concept of how much you could demand for those thousand views, right if people you know, if you could show that people come to your page and they spend twenty minutes on it, that would be phenomenal. That would be an incredibly long time for someone to spend on a web page that's not say a social network platform or something like YouTube. Then you could demand higher prices for those thousand views, whereas if people you would come to your page and then almost immediately bounce, you would probably only be able to get a small amount per a thousand views. So all of that factors in right. And of course there are other advertising models as well, uh, such as ones that pay out not on page views but on user actions such as clicking through the ad to go to a related product or service page, or in some cases, actually making a purchase following such an action, So like, not only did they click through the ad, they bought something, and that's where the revenue comes from for the person who's allowing the ad to be on their page. So that forms the basis of making revenue on the web at that basic level. There are obviously many other ways to do it, but generally speaking, the web advertisement side is the revenue side. The search engine bit that's the discovery side, that's the opportunity, that's how you get the people to your stuff. And if we get meta and we start looking at web traffic, we can actually start to see what people are looking for. And if you know what folks are looking for, then you can try and meet that need. So there are a lot of web analytics out there where you can actually find things like how many people searched for a certain term, Like there's Google trends right where you can look and see what people are looking for. And if a lot of people are looking for something and there aren't a lot of great options to go to to see that something, there's an opportunity there. Well, this is interesting because you know, I you can call me a content creator. I actually don't like that term. I know a lot of people use it, but it seems so like, uh, robotic to me, Like there's no there's no humanity in the in the terms content creator as far as I can tell. But maybe I'm just projecting too much. Anyway, if you think of someone who creates stuff on the web, they might come at that from one of many different ways. Maybe they they're doing it because they have a true passion for whatever it is they do, and they just follow that passion and that's why they're creating the thing they create. Uh, that to me feels really you know, pure and lovely and I love seeing those kinds of people on the web and I love seeing them flourish. There are others who they want to create. They don't have a specific passion they want to follow, but they want to create because they think think that's the way they want to make a living. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not I'm not saying that this is lesser than So they're not necessarily following their passion for any particular topic. Rather, they are looking to see what topics are people interested in, and then they go out to cover those topics in order to meet that need. Like they think, well, why can't I be the person to create this thing that people want to see? And again, there's nothing wrong with that. Um, it's just a different method of going about it. And I also don't know. I don't know. I consider myself more of the first category than the second category. I don't know how sustainable that is over the long run, right, I don't know if you would burn out faster if you were just constantly trying to meet the the needs of your identified audience. Anyway, this would mean that sites what could do things like, uh, look around at analytics and see that maybe people are looking for information about how to, I don't know, hook up a toe hitch to a truck. I'm not giving that example for any specific reason, but if you ask me about it in person, I'll tell you the specific reason. Anyway, you then decide you're gonna make a dash for creating an online resource that at least claims to show how to hook up a toe hitch to a truck. And you know that since people are searching for it, they're bound to find yours because you already saw that there's actually a lack of resources out there. Now, remember this is like, you know, more than a decade ago at this point, But creating the piece not isn't that necessarily enough on its own? Like that, you know, just because you wrote something doesn't mean it's going to rank well. So you also need to make sure that piece shows up pretty high up in search results. So you practice something called search engine optimization or SEO, and you use a bunch of different strategies to give your page a good chance to rank high on search results on engines like Google. In fact, you would probably only focus on Google because so much search traffic goes through the Google engine. If the majority of the people are using Google to search stuff, then it just makes sense to focus your efforts there. You wouldn't want to go and focus on smaller search engines because even if you did well, you'd still only be getting a fraction of the traffic that Google could send you. So you focus on Google. Back in the day, Google was actually you know, easy to gamify, easy, being in quotation marks easier, I guess I should say, and uh. And you know, most folks don't ever bother to go beyond the first page of search results. In fact, a lot of people never bother to scroll down below what is called the fold. So if you know, whatever you see on your on your page when you first do a search result, anything below the bottom of the screen that's called below the fold, it would require you to scroll down to see it. A lot of people don't even bother to do that. So you definitely want to be in those first couple of results. If you can get your article about toe hitches to rank up there, you're almost guaranteed to capture a ton of traffic from the people who are looking that information up and through web advertisements on your page about toe hitches, you can generate revenue as more and more people come to the page. Now, that's just one little topic. Obviously you couldn't make a living off of that. But what if you could scale that operation up like big time, Like what if you were to hire dozens of writers at a pretty low rate of pay. In fact, some content farms would outsource articles to writers in countries like the Philippines, where it wasn't uncommon for folks to make just a dollar an hour. One person said she averaged between five and ten dollars an hour writing articles and managed on average to have an output of about one article per hour. But then there are other content farms that would pay more by the word, and that could range like three to five cents a word, and that would be for the higher paid writers. Of others who were entry level, they might be getting a little bit of like a penny and a fraction per word. So there is an incentive to generate a lot of words, right, because that's how you're getting paid. If that's the metric. So some would do a per article basis, some would do an hourly basis, some would do per word basis. In the United States, in two simply hired the average content writer makes around thirty four thousand dollars per year today. Uh. Now, keep in mind we're also talking about era where content farms are not nearly the thing they were a decade ago. Thirty four thousand dollars is a hair under the annual median personal income for folks in America, so it means you would actually be below the median for income. However, I should add that this is from again a post content farm perspective. Back in the content farm days, the content writer average was probably a little bit lower. All right, So let's say you can hire a bunch of writers for really low wages, so you have a fairly low overhead, and you know, maybe they make money on a per article basis. Maybe part of their compensation is related to revenue generated by the article, so that they get essentially residuals if the article is really popular. That did happen in the cont farm days, at least in some content farms. It wasn't applicable to every writer for every content farm, but it did happen. So folks who you know, managed to hit on something that really did well, they could actually potentially make money. A sort of a long tail kind of revenue generator where over time they would get residual checks, usually not a lot per article, but if you write a lot of articles and several of them are hits, it could be a nice little source of money. Well, the goal is to build out a very large operation with relatively low overhead, and you just churn out articles based upon web traffic patterns. So it's not that you're a website that has a focus, right. That would be the the antithesis of a content farm, Like you wouldn't typically find a content farm about a specific topic. No, content farms would tackle anything and everything largely based upon analysis of web traffic. They would flood the Internet with tons of articles about stuff where there was a perceived gap of information, which again represented an opportunity. The term content farm frequently implies that the actual content on the site in question is of inferior quality, that, in an effort to minimize costs while maximizing effect, writers spew out hastily written pieces, perhaps poorly researched, or even just playing wrong or useless. Because the goal isn't to produce good work, The goal is just to fill those niches in search results in order to capture the traffic. This was all about pouncing on opportunities that opened up through search, and for the writers, particularly those who were paid on a per article basis, the motivation was to write more assignments to make more money. It was a machine for generating substandard work. That's not to say that every piece written for a content farm was bad, or that the people writing for content farms were ad or sloppy writers. A lot of them are quite good. But rather I mean to say the nature of the business put very little emphasis on quality and a whole lot more emphasis on quantity. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we will talk a little bit more about content farms and then click bait. One thing I didn't mention before the break is something else the content farms became notorious for, which was stealing content from other sites. I mean, what's cheaper than paying someone to write an article, taking someone else's article, stripping it of some details, and then putting it up on your site. In fact, on more than one occasion, I would come across one of my own articles that I had written for house stuff works dot com and I would see that my name had been taken off the article, but it was definitely my article, like word for word, not even you know, paraphrase, but literally just copy and pasted and would even include in many cases illustrations that came out of our office. We had artists working in our office who would make illustrations, and you would even see like how stuff works written on the illustrations. In some cases, it was a blatant case of plagiarism, and that in itself was difficult to deal with because it was popping up all over the place, like it was popping up faster than you could take action on it. Now, this whole content farm strategy worked for as long as ranking and search could be gamified. As long as you could reliably get into those top search results, then this was open season. Rushing to fill the voids would pay off, with some sites ballooning to thousands or hundreds of thousands of articles, and dozens of new articles would launch every single day, all in an effort to dominate search. There was no there's no even pretense that these were sites that were trying to get people to go to the site on their own and then just kind of browse around. Everything on the site was engineered to be something that would show up in search, and that's how they would get their traffic. Now, I want to also say this, when I work for How Stuff Works, a lot of our traffic came in through search. It turned out that a lot of people were finding our articles through search, so we were benefiting from the search stuff just like content farms were. We weren't operating like a content farm. Heck, I would write when I started, I think I wrote one article every two weeks because I would have one full week to research and right a draft of the article, and I would turn it in on a Friday, and I would have the following week to revise that article, while I would start a second article like the next new one. Uh and on the second Friday that's when the article I had been working on would go live on the site. So that's not a content farm. Like a content farm is churning out articles way faster with very little regard to the quality of the work. This was great in the short term for content farms that you know they were able to to get this much traffic, like the fact that they were able to gamify the system and to get a bunch of writers to create hundreds of articles in a short amount of time. It was a great way to make money. Uh, it wasn't great, but it could be good for the writers, depending upon you know which outlets they were working for and what their pay rates were for those are outlets. Uh. And it was not great for everybody else because it would mean that you know, you would be searching for something and you might land on a page that, more likely than not, isn't a very good quality for whatever it was that you were searching for. And it was really really not great for Google because Google was having to deal with the fact the users were getting disenchanted after encountering so many garbage articles that were ranking in Google Search. It was it was making Google Search appeared to be unreliable because the destinations you were going to we're pretty crappy. So in fact, I guess I can talk about this now. Um way back in the day, who I was still a writer for how stuff works dot com, there was a point where Google representatives actually reached out to me asking if how Stuff Works might produce articles in specific areas because the search engine needed to direct people to higher quality articles. So they actually handed me a list of topics that they said we need we need better version articles out there because the ones that people are finding are terrible. While the articles on how stuff works dot Com were and are heavily researched, and the writing staff, like I said that, you know, we mainly came from English degrees, right, We all studied English lit or or something along those lines, you know, and we all had backgrounds in research and writing papers with citations and all that kind of fun stuff. So Google is trying to push back a bit against content farms and to touch base with more respected sites to provide higher quality articles that wouldn't be such a dragged land on when someone searched for those terms. Now, that was potentially an incredibly valuable thing for me to receive as someone who produces content. Uh, I mean for a search engine to actually say, hey, just so you know, folks are really looking for articles about this stuff, but they're finding trash. That meant that there was this huge opportunity to write better stuff. However, I have to say a lot of the topics Google handed to us just weren't really how stuff works material. I don't mean they were like salacious or anything like that, just that they were a bit too niche and mundane and like, there'd be no reason to write a how stuff works style article on most of those topics. So while it represents it an opportunity, we didn't actually really take advantage of it. Anyway. Google would later revise its search algorithm to really deal with this issue of junk articles more directly. Uh, this was more than a decade ago. Like, in my mind this happened maybe five years ago, but it's because I have lost all concept of time. But no, it happened in two thousand eleven when Google launched the Panda algorithm, actually named after one of the Google engineers. Uh. The purpose of the Panda algorithm was to promote high quality sites over junk sites. So if you did a search and results were coming up, the search algorithm would now UH promote the higher quality sites over the lower quality ones. They would rank higher in search. So if you look for an article about I don't know chicken salad, whichever site Google considered to be the most high quality would rank highest. Sites Google identified as hosting thousands of low quality articles would get punished by the algorithm UM, often totally site wide. So even if that site hosted a few really good articles and a lot of content farms had really good articles. Even if it had really good articles, if the site was mostly filled up with junk articles, it was gonna get dinged across the board. So this was a huge blow to content farms. Google also released a blog post about the algorithm, explaining the criteria that they used to determine if a site merits the designation of high quality, and it was stuff like, if you went to the site and you read the article, would you feel like you could trust what the article had to say or would the content and presentation of the information make you distrust the article. It also looked into stuff like whether or not experts or highly qualified writers were contributing to the piece. A lot of content farms gave little to no information about the people who are actually writing the articles, so that would be a blow against them. If the site contained a lot of duplicate or overlapping article topics where you know, you're just blasting maybe a hundred articles about towing, uh, that could ding you pretty bad. Now. The Penguin algorithm would follow in two thousand twelve, and that algorithm aimed at sites that created what we're called unnatural back links. Now, I'm not going to get into all of that, except to say one of the factors that Google's search algorithm would take into account back in the day was how many links are aiming at a particular web page that pops up for a particular search query. So again, let's say the search queries chicken salad, and the Google algorithm starts crawling the web and pulling all the different hits that relate to chicken salad. One of the things that would look at is say, how many other sites linked to this page about chicken salad. If a lot of sites are linking to this page age, then that seems to indicate that it's a good page, that it's it's good enough to convince other people, Hey, I'm gonna link to this because it's worthwhile. And thus Google would draw the conclusion, or rather the algorithm would draw the conclusion that this must be a better result because a lot of people are linking to it. But you could gamify that. You can just create tons of back links to your individual pages, and by linking to everything, you would appear to boost this metric, and Google Search would then say, oh, this must be a good article because look at how many links are aiming into it. Penguin was meant to fight against that. Penguin, as far as I know, was not named after the Google engineer like Panda was, and eventually both Panda and Penguin were mostly made moot when Google launched Hummingbird. Now Penguin and Panda were kind of like patching the search algorithm. Hummingbird was a total overhaul to Google's search algorithm, and this was also the era where you would hear about sites really taking a big hit because they had been so dependent upon search traffic, and when Google changed the way it handled search results, even sites that were considered respectable and high quality ended up seeing an enormous change in their traffic from search. And when that's how you've based your entire mode of operations for years, it's incredibly disruptive. It's also one of the reasons why people who have been in content creation for a very long time stress the importance that you don't put all of your eggs in one basket, right Like, you don't put everything that you work on and have it depend upon YouTube, because if you did, and Google changes the YouTube algorithm and stops suggesting your videos to people, who are interested in stuff that you cover. Well, then suddenly you your videos just starting getting views anymore. Your traffic just dies. This has happened time and time again. In fact, it happens almost cyclically. So this was kind of a big reminder here the Google search changes. That was a big reminder that depending upon a different party and their performance to make your business work is incredibly risky because if that other party goes out of business or changes the way it does things, that has a direct impact on you. It's crazy to me how many businesses went through that and did not appear to learn from that lesson. But anyway, Okay, we've got a little bit more to say about content farms and than clickbait. But before I get into all that, let's take another quick break. Alright. So Google makes these changes to its search algorithm, and immediately there's an enormous impact. Traffic to sites like content farms dropped dramatically. For one UH company that was known for making content farms also sometimes called content mills, they saw drop in traffic across all their sites, pretty pretty dramatic. Most people just weren't navigating to sites like ehal and browsing. I mean again, like it showed that the sites were not destinations on their own. Nobody was typing in ehal dot com and going to it. They were finding stuff through search, and when search stopped suggesting it, the traffic really died out. So a lot of those sites ended up shutting down. Not Ehal that one's stuck around, but again their traffic was hurt pretty badly. Now you don't here quite as much about content farms these days, though you could argue they still exist, they just evolved. Um, but you do hear about clickbait. That term originated from a blog post written by a guy named Jay Geiger back in two thousand six, and the name pretty much tells you everything you need to know about what clickbait is. It's something that you see that tempts you to click on it. It lures you in like bait does on a on a hook. Now, maybe that clickbait comes in the form of a provocative thumbnail for a YouTube video, usually coupled with an equally provocative title. Maybe it's just an outlandish headline for a news article. Maybe it appears to answer a question that you could have sworn has no answer, and the concept of clickbait is of course, way way older than the Internet. The same basic idea was used more than a century ago, when various newspapers, most of which we're having some sort of dubious reputation, would rely upon sensationalized headlines in order to sell papers. So this was the era of yellow journalism. And of course, back then the goal was to convince people to hand over some of their money to buy a paper. But the basics remain the same. You use tried and true methods to convince folks to take an action, even if that action, in this case is just clicking through a link. This typically involves appealing to some pretty basic human traits. Frequently I see clickbait used in the context of a sort of bait and switch, that being it's a thing that lures you in, and it turns out that the thing that lured you in isn't actually present in the thing you really encounter. Golly, I've seen bait and switches a lot these days, and in fact, they pop up in my Google alerts, which is really frustrating. I've got an Android phone and I a little notifications about stuff that I might be interested in. Those of you who have listened to large Nerdroun Collider know that I do a podcast about geeky pop culture stuff, so I get a lot of geeky pop culture headlines that pop up, including a ton that try to push me towards sites that aren't actually news sites. There's one in particular that's a YouTube channel that supposedly has trailers for stuff well before anyone else does. Except they're not real trailers. They're fake trailers. They're trailers that are cobbled together from footage from other stuff and presented as if it's a legit trailer for some either upcoming or even unannounced project. Uh, and that's popping up in my notifications. That's definitely a bait and switch. I've also seen things where people have kind of taken a click bade approach to stuff like a SMR videos. Now I've been watching a SMR videos for a really long time. Law of time listeners will remember I once interviewed a s MR artist, Heather Feather, who hasn't been active in a few years, but was one of the pioneers really in the a s m R field back in the day. Well, a lot of those videos now have thumbnails that are meant to be extremely provocative in some way or another. Uh, some of which are kind of sexualized, some of which appear to suggest violence. It's kind of crazy when you think that a SMR is really supposed to be about like relaxing and and chilling out, and I see these videos like this. This doesn't seem to be sending the message of chilling out to me. But whatever. Anyway, a lot of that just means that these artists are following one of are seen to be best practices. They are the way to get people to click. So it's not necessarily that they want to do this, or at least not that they, you know, set out to do this, but rather this is one of the ways where you stand out and you get people to click on your work and hopefully enjoy it, even though the work may not be reflective of whatever you use to lure them in the first place. That's the danger, right If you feel that the thing you are served is not the same thing you were promised, you're likely to be a little upset. But I get it. You know, traffic amounts to revenue, so you've got to get folks in the door, and the Internet is a vast treasure trove of content. Some of that content is good or even really good, a lot of it's mediocre, and some of it is really bad, and it could be stuff. It would be really tough to stand out, even if you are putting out great, great content, so you've got to use all the tricks you can. It's something I've never been particularly good at. Now. There are a few other related things we can chat about briefly that kind of fall into these content buckets, whether it's content farm or click bait. A big one of those, at least in my mind, are quizzes and galleries. You don't see that as often. There's still some sites that take the gallery approach, and I hate it, but I understand why it's happening, just like I understand why quizzes are so popular. So the reason why quizzes and galleries are beloved by content farm like entities is that they represent a potentially large number of clicks for a potentially low investment. Like let's talk about a quiz. Let's say a quiz is twenty questions long, but the way you make the quiz is that each question is its own little web page, and you choose like maybe it's a multiple choice answer. You choose your multiple choice answer, you hit next, and then you get the next question. Now, in your experience, what you're doing is you're just answering questions and getting the next one. But what's going on, you know, from a business perspective, is that every single time you're answering a question, jen you're loading a new web page. Every time you load a new web page, that's an opportunity to serve you and add and every time you keep on going through those quizzes, uh, then you start ranking up those page views. It's a great way for page views to go through the roof very quickly. If you write really good quizzes, and by good I mean sticky, like people want to answer them. They'll go on and they'll start taking the next quiz after they get the first one, and they'll just keep on going and those numbers keep on going up. So that is incredibly attractive to websites that that host a lot of content. It means that they, you know, if they're getting their web advertising based on page views, then that's a way to really drive those page views up. Same with galleries, where it would be like a slide show where you've got a picture and then you hit next. Well, it's not just that it's reloading a new picture, right, You're not just getting a new photo. That's actually counting as a whole new page view. So from an advertising perspective, you just went from someone who gave one page view to two page views, and you keep clicking through those page views goes up, go up and up. A lot of content companies out there present their articles in a slide show approach, which gets a little gross. Back at how stuff works, we did galleries and we did quizzes toward the end of my time at how stuff works, not so much in the beginning. And the beginning it was more articles. But even then we would arrange our articles in pages. Uh. The idea being that it would get kind of intimidating if the article was all in one unbroken page, because you'd just be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, particularly for really dense topics. So we would organize our our material by pages and we'd say, all right, well we're gonna talk about one specific thing about this, you know, in my case technology, I'm going to dedicate a whole page each to this, and then the next page will be the next part about this and the pages were you know, they were long. They weren't. It wasn't like a paragraph. Um. But we also gave the opportunity for people to use the print article feature, which wouldn't immediately send it to the printer, but it would give you the full article in one page view and you wouldn't, you know, click next page, next page, next page. So we did give people that option. Um. But yeah, like as we started doing things like introducing quizzes and galleries, I got a little squeaked out by that because I felt like it was almost like we were trying to trick page views out of folks. I mean, they were getting stuff too, like they were getting an experience as well, but it never felt like it was in the same spirit as the articles were. So I always felt uneasy about it. Anyway. That's the whole story around content farms and click bait from that conceptual level why they exist. Uh, they can get really exasperating and you're a user, When you're a consumer and you're just trying to find something good, Uh, they get really frustrating. There are entire YouTube channels that are just dedicated to churning out video after video after video of crap content, sometimes misleading content, like it'll be something that is fake but not expressed that it's fate, so it's presented as true to the audience. I'm thinking of a lot of cooking videos actually fall into that category. In fact, how to Cook channel is fantastic because the host of that channel, she takes time to go through some of the viral videos in the cooking field and talk about how those are misrepresenting what you can and can't do with food. It's a fantastic channel, great for critical thinkers. So I hope you enjoyed this. It was gonna be a tidbit, but now I'm looking at my recording and I'm already up to like thirty six minutes, So this was a longer tidbit than I thought. It just shows that I'm a chatter box. However, we'll be back with more episodes of tech stuff throughout the week. Tomorrow we should have a new news episode, and then we'll have some new episodes next week. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech stuff, whether it's a tidbit, maybe it's a topic in tech that doesn't merit a full episode, but you're just curious about it, you want to hear my thoughts, let me know. Or if there's some trend in technology or specific company or specific type of tech, anything like that that you want to know about, you can let me know that as well. The best way to get in touch with me is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and how the tech area for today's text stuff tidbits. That's the new thing I'm doing on Wednesdays where I do a shorter topic. I thought I would talk a little bit about content farms and click bait, and I think of these as kind of like cousins. So we'll start with the concept of content farms. Now, to understand how content farms became a thing, it's necessary to talk about web advertising and search engines because those are the two components that made content farms a viable business idea. So here's the super short version of web advertising. Obviously, it involves making deal with some sort of advertising entity where that entity will give you money in exchange for allowing the entity to put up advertising on your site in some way. Now, usually that money is actually contingent upon some other criteria, not just that you allow them to take up landscape, because that's just not good enough. If no one ever goes to your web page, then the ad is doing nothing. It's it's like if you put a billboard up in the middle of the Sahara desert where nobody goes. So web advertising quickly adopted a few different models, and I'll give a few examples. So one was just based on page views, so the advertiser would get data about how many people had visited that web page in a given amount of time, and they might also get a little more data such as, you know, how much time the average person spent on the page. And generally speaking, the more people who visit, the longer that they stay on a page, the more valuable the page is uh and the more likely they are, obviously to encounter or even perhaps act upon advertising. So you've got a lot of different concepts wrapped up in here. You would typically have a uh, you know, a per thousand deal for views. So you might say like, okay, well we'll pay you five dollars per thousand views this web page gets, because that means one thousand times people saw are at You also had the concept of how much you could demand for those thousand views, right if people you know, if you could show that people come to your page and they spend twenty minutes on it, that would be phenomenal. That would be an incredibly long time for someone to spend on a web page that's not say a social network platform or something like YouTube. Then you could demand higher prices for those thousand views, whereas if people you would come to your page and then almost immediately bounce, you would probably only be able to get a small amount per a thousand views. So all of that factors in right. And of course there are other advertising models as well, uh, such as ones that pay out not on page views but on user actions such as clicking through the ad to go to a related product or service page, or in some cases, actually making a purchase following such an action, So like, not only did they click through the ad, they bought something, and that's where the revenue comes from for the person who's allowing the ad to be on their page. So that forms the basis of making revenue on the web at that basic level. There are obviously many other ways to do it, but generally speaking, the web advertisement side is the revenue side. The search engine bit that's the discovery side, that's the opportunity, that's how you get the people to your stuff. And if we get meta and we start looking at web traffic, we can actually start to see what people are looking for. And if you know what folks are looking for, then you can try and meet that need. So there are a lot of web analytics out there where you can actually find things like how many people searched for a certain term, Like there's Google trends right where you can look and see what people are looking for. And if a lot of people are looking for something and there aren't a lot of great options to go to to see that something, there's an opportunity there. Well, this is interesting because you know, I you can call me a content creator. I actually don't like that term. I know a lot of people use it, but it seems so like, uh, robotic to me, Like there's no there's no humanity in the in the terms content creator as far as I can tell. But maybe I'm just projecting too much. Anyway, if you think of someone who creates stuff on the web, they might come at that from one of many different ways. Maybe they they're doing it because they have a true passion for whatever it is they do, and they just follow that passion and that's why they're creating the thing they create. Uh, that to me feels really you know, pure and lovely and I love seeing those kinds of people on the web and I love seeing them flourish. There are others who they want to create. They don't have a specific passion they want to follow, but they want to create because they think think that's the way they want to make a living. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not I'm not saying that this is lesser than So they're not necessarily following their passion for any particular topic. Rather, they are looking to see what topics are people interested in, and then they go out to cover those topics in order to meet that need. Like they think, well, why can't I be the person to create this thing that people want to see? And again, there's nothing wrong with that. Um, it's just a different method of going about it. And I also don't know. I don't know. I consider myself more of the first category than the second category. I don't know how sustainable that is over the long run, right, I don't know if you would burn out faster if you were just constantly trying to meet the the needs of your identified audience. Anyway, this would mean that sites what could do things like, uh, look around at analytics and see that maybe people are looking for information about how to, I don't know, hook up a toe hitch to a truck. I'm not giving that example for any specific reason, but if you ask me about it in person, I'll tell you the specific reason. Anyway, you then decide you're gonna make a dash for creating an online resource that at least claims to show how to hook up a toe hitch to a truck. And you know that since people are searching for it, they're bound to find yours because you already saw that there's actually a lack of resources out there. Now, remember this is like, you know, more than a decade ago at this point, But creating the piece not isn't that necessarily enough on its own? Like that, you know, just because you wrote something doesn't mean it's going to rank well. So you also need to make sure that piece shows up pretty high up in search results. So you practice something called search engine optimization or SEO, and you use a bunch of different strategies to give your page a good chance to rank high on search results on engines like Google. In fact, you would probably only focus on Google because so much search traffic goes through the Google engine. If the majority of the people are using Google to search stuff, then it just makes sense to focus your efforts there. You wouldn't want to go and focus on smaller search engines because even if you did well, you'd still only be getting a fraction of the traffic that Google could send you. So you focus on Google. Back in the day, Google was actually you know, easy to gamify, easy, being in quotation marks easier, I guess I should say, and uh. And you know, most folks don't ever bother to go beyond the first page of search results. In fact, a lot of people never bother to scroll down below what is called the fold. So if you know, whatever you see on your on your page when you first do a search result, anything below the bottom of the screen that's called below the fold, it would require you to scroll down to see it. A lot of people don't even bother to do that. So you definitely want to be in those first couple of results. If you can get your article about toe hitches to rank up there, you're almost guaranteed to capture a ton of traffic from the people who are looking that information up and through web advertisements on your page about toe hitches, you can generate revenue as more and more people come to the page. Now, that's just one little topic. Obviously you couldn't make a living off of that. But what if you could scale that operation up like big time, Like what if you were to hire dozens of writers at a pretty low rate of pay. In fact, some content farms would outsource articles to writers in countries like the Philippines, where it wasn't uncommon for folks to make just a dollar an hour. One person said she averaged between five and ten dollars an hour writing articles and managed on average to have an output of about one article per hour. But then there are other content farms that would pay more by the word, and that could range like three to five cents a word, and that would be for the higher paid writers. Of others who were entry level, they might be getting a little bit of like a penny and a fraction per word. So there is an incentive to generate a lot of words, right, because that's how you're getting paid. If that's the metric. So some would do a per article basis, some would do an hourly basis, some would do per word basis. In the United States, in two simply hired the average content writer makes around thirty four thousand dollars per year today. Uh. Now, keep in mind we're also talking about era where content farms are not nearly the thing they were a decade ago. Thirty four thousand dollars is a hair under the annual median personal income for folks in America, so it means you would actually be below the median for income. However, I should add that this is from again a post content farm perspective. Back in the content farm days, the content writer average was probably a little bit lower. All right, So let's say you can hire a bunch of writers for really low wages, so you have a fairly low overhead, and you know, maybe they make money on a per article basis. Maybe part of their compensation is related to revenue generated by the article, so that they get essentially residuals if the article is really popular. That did happen in the cont farm days, at least in some content farms. It wasn't applicable to every writer for every content farm, but it did happen. So folks who you know, managed to hit on something that really did well, they could actually potentially make money. A sort of a long tail kind of revenue generator where over time they would get residual checks, usually not a lot per article, but if you write a lot of articles and several of them are hits, it could be a nice little source of money. Well, the goal is to build out a very large operation with relatively low overhead, and you just churn out articles based upon web traffic patterns. So it's not that you're a website that has a focus, right. That would be the the antithesis of a content farm, Like you wouldn't typically find a content farm about a specific topic. No, content farms would tackle anything and everything largely based upon analysis of web traffic. They would flood the Internet with tons of articles about stuff where there was a perceived gap of information, which again represented an opportunity. The term content farm frequently implies that the actual content on the site in question is of inferior quality, that, in an effort to minimize costs while maximizing effect, writers spew out hastily written pieces, perhaps poorly researched, or even just playing wrong or useless. Because the goal isn't to produce good work, The goal is just to fill those niches in search results in order to capture the traffic. This was all about pouncing on opportunities that opened up through search, and for the writers, particularly those who were paid on a per article basis, the motivation was to write more assignments to make more money. It was a machine for generating substandard work. That's not to say that every piece written for a content farm was bad, or that the people writing for content farms were ad or sloppy writers. A lot of them are quite good. But rather I mean to say the nature of the business put very little emphasis on quality and a whole lot more emphasis on quantity. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we will talk a little bit more about content farms and then click bait. One thing I didn't mention before the break is something else the content farms became notorious for, which was stealing content from other sites. I mean, what's cheaper than paying someone to write an article, taking someone else's article, stripping it of some details, and then putting it up on your site. In fact, on more than one occasion, I would come across one of my own articles that I had written for house stuff works dot com and I would see that my name had been taken off the article, but it was definitely my article, like word for word, not even you know, paraphrase, but literally just copy and pasted and would even include in many cases illustrations that came out of our office. We had artists working in our office who would make illustrations, and you would even see like how stuff works written on the illustrations. In some cases, it was a blatant case of plagiarism, and that in itself was difficult to deal with because it was popping up all over the place, like it was popping up faster than you could take action on it. Now, this whole content farm strategy worked for as long as ranking and search could be gamified. As long as you could reliably get into those top search results, then this was open season. Rushing to fill the voids would pay off, with some sites ballooning to thousands or hundreds of thousands of articles, and dozens of new articles would launch every single day, all in an effort to dominate search. There was no there's no even pretense that these were sites that were trying to get people to go to the site on their own and then just kind of browse around. Everything on the site was engineered to be something that would show up in search, and that's how they would get their traffic. Now, I want to also say this, when I work for How Stuff Works, a lot of our traffic came in through search. It turned out that a lot of people were finding our articles through search, so we were benefiting from the search stuff just like content farms were. We weren't operating like a content farm. Heck, I would write when I started, I think I wrote one article every two weeks because I would have one full week to research and right a draft of the article, and I would turn it in on a Friday, and I would have the following week to revise that article, while I would start a second article like the next new one. Uh and on the second Friday that's when the article I had been working on would go live on the site. So that's not a content farm. Like a content farm is churning out articles way faster with very little regard to the quality of the work. This was great in the short term for content farms that you know they were able to to get this much traffic, like the fact that they were able to gamify the system and to get a bunch of writers to create hundreds of articles in a short amount of time. It was a great way to make money. Uh, it wasn't great, but it could be good for the writers, depending upon you know which outlets they were working for and what their pay rates were for those are outlets. Uh. And it was not great for everybody else because it would mean that you know, you would be searching for something and you might land on a page that, more likely than not, isn't a very good quality for whatever it was that you were searching for. And it was really really not great for Google because Google was having to deal with the fact the users were getting disenchanted after encountering so many garbage articles that were ranking in Google Search. It was it was making Google Search appeared to be unreliable because the destinations you were going to we're pretty crappy. So in fact, I guess I can talk about this now. Um way back in the day, who I was still a writer for how stuff works dot com, there was a point where Google representatives actually reached out to me asking if how Stuff Works might produce articles in specific areas because the search engine needed to direct people to higher quality articles. So they actually handed me a list of topics that they said we need we need better version articles out there because the ones that people are finding are terrible. While the articles on how stuff works dot Com were and are heavily researched, and the writing staff, like I said that, you know, we mainly came from English degrees, right, We all studied English lit or or something along those lines, you know, and we all had backgrounds in research and writing papers with citations and all that kind of fun stuff. So Google is trying to push back a bit against content farms and to touch base with more respected sites to provide higher quality articles that wouldn't be such a dragged land on when someone searched for those terms. Now, that was potentially an incredibly valuable thing for me to receive as someone who produces content. Uh, I mean for a search engine to actually say, hey, just so you know, folks are really looking for articles about this stuff, but they're finding trash. That meant that there was this huge opportunity to write better stuff. However, I have to say a lot of the topics Google handed to us just weren't really how stuff works material. I don't mean they were like salacious or anything like that, just that they were a bit too niche and mundane and like, there'd be no reason to write a how stuff works style article on most of those topics. So while it represents it an opportunity, we didn't actually really take advantage of it. Anyway. Google would later revise its search algorithm to really deal with this issue of junk articles more directly. Uh, this was more than a decade ago. Like, in my mind this happened maybe five years ago, but it's because I have lost all concept of time. But no, it happened in two thousand eleven when Google launched the Panda algorithm, actually named after one of the Google engineers. Uh. The purpose of the Panda algorithm was to promote high quality sites over junk sites. So if you did a search and results were coming up, the search algorithm would now UH promote the higher quality sites over the lower quality ones. They would rank higher in search. So if you look for an article about I don't know chicken salad, whichever site Google considered to be the most high quality would rank highest. Sites Google identified as hosting thousands of low quality articles would get punished by the algorithm UM, often totally site wide. So even if that site hosted a few really good articles and a lot of content farms had really good articles. Even if it had really good articles, if the site was mostly filled up with junk articles, it was gonna get dinged across the board. So this was a huge blow to content farms. Google also released a blog post about the algorithm, explaining the criteria that they used to determine if a site merits the designation of high quality, and it was stuff like, if you went to the site and you read the article, would you feel like you could trust what the article had to say or would the content and presentation of the information make you distrust the article. It also looked into stuff like whether or not experts or highly qualified writers were contributing to the piece. A lot of content farms gave little to no information about the people who are actually writing the articles, so that would be a blow against them. If the site contained a lot of duplicate or overlapping article topics where you know, you're just blasting maybe a hundred articles about towing, uh, that could ding you pretty bad. Now. The Penguin algorithm would follow in two thousand twelve, and that algorithm aimed at sites that created what we're called unnatural back links. Now, I'm not going to get into all of that, except to say one of the factors that Google's search algorithm would take into account back in the day was how many links are aiming at a particular web page that pops up for a particular search query. So again, let's say the search queries chicken salad, and the Google algorithm starts crawling the web and pulling all the different hits that relate to chicken salad. One of the things that would look at is say, how many other sites linked to this page about chicken salad. If a lot of sites are linking to this page age, then that seems to indicate that it's a good page, that it's it's good enough to convince other people, Hey, I'm gonna link to this because it's worthwhile. And thus Google would draw the conclusion, or rather the algorithm would draw the conclusion that this must be a better result because a lot of people are linking to it. But you could gamify that. You can just create tons of back links to your individual pages, and by linking to everything, you would appear to boost this metric, and Google Search would then say, oh, this must be a good article because look at how many links are aiming into it. Penguin was meant to fight against that. Penguin, as far as I know, was not named after the Google engineer like Panda was, and eventually both Panda and Penguin were mostly made moot when Google launched Hummingbird. Now Penguin and Panda were kind of like patching the search algorithm. Hummingbird was a total overhaul to Google's search algorithm, and this was also the era where you would hear about sites really taking a big hit because they had been so dependent upon search traffic, and when Google changed the way it handled search results, even sites that were considered respectable and high quality ended up seeing an enormous change in their traffic from search. And when that's how you've based your entire mode of operations for years, it's incredibly disruptive. It's also one of the reasons why people who have been in content creation for a very long time stress the importance that you don't put all of your eggs in one basket, right Like, you don't put everything that you work on and have it depend upon YouTube, because if you did, and Google changes the YouTube algorithm and stops suggesting your videos to people, who are interested in stuff that you cover. Well, then suddenly you your videos just starting getting views anymore. Your traffic just dies. This has happened time and time again. In fact, it happens almost cyclically. So this was kind of a big reminder here the Google search changes. That was a big reminder that depending upon a different party and their performance to make your business work is incredibly risky because if that other party goes out of business or changes the way it does things, that has a direct impact on you. It's crazy to me how many businesses went through that and did not appear to learn from that lesson. But anyway, Okay, we've got a little bit more to say about content farms and than clickbait. But before I get into all that, let's take another quick break. Alright. So Google makes these changes to its search algorithm, and immediately there's an enormous impact. Traffic to sites like content farms dropped dramatically. For one UH company that was known for making content farms also sometimes called content mills, they saw drop in traffic across all their sites, pretty pretty dramatic. Most people just weren't navigating to sites like ehal and browsing. I mean again, like it showed that the sites were not destinations on their own. Nobody was typing in ehal dot com and going to it. They were finding stuff through search, and when search stopped suggesting it, the traffic really died out. So a lot of those sites ended up shutting down. Not Ehal that one's stuck around, but again their traffic was hurt pretty badly. Now you don't here quite as much about content farms these days, though you could argue they still exist, they just evolved. Um, but you do hear about clickbait. That term originated from a blog post written by a guy named Jay Geiger back in two thousand six, and the name pretty much tells you everything you need to know about what clickbait is. It's something that you see that tempts you to click on it. It lures you in like bait does on a on a hook. Now, maybe that clickbait comes in the form of a provocative thumbnail for a YouTube video, usually coupled with an equally provocative title. Maybe it's just an outlandish headline for a news article. Maybe it appears to answer a question that you could have sworn has no answer, and the concept of clickbait is of course, way way older than the Internet. The same basic idea was used more than a century ago, when various newspapers, most of which we're having some sort of dubious reputation, would rely upon sensationalized headlines in order to sell papers. So this was the era of yellow journalism. And of course, back then the goal was to convince people to hand over some of their money to buy a paper. But the basics remain the same. You use tried and true methods to convince folks to take an action, even if that action, in this case is just clicking through a link. This typically involves appealing to some pretty basic human traits. Frequently I see clickbait used in the context of a sort of bait and switch, that being it's a thing that lures you in, and it turns out that the thing that lured you in isn't actually present in the thing you really encounter. Golly, I've seen bait and switches a lot these days, and in fact, they pop up in my Google alerts, which is really frustrating. I've got an Android phone and I a little notifications about stuff that I might be interested in. Those of you who have listened to large Nerdroun Collider know that I do a podcast about geeky pop culture stuff, so I get a lot of geeky pop culture headlines that pop up, including a ton that try to push me towards sites that aren't actually news sites. There's one in particular that's a YouTube channel that supposedly has trailers for stuff well before anyone else does. Except they're not real trailers. They're fake trailers. They're trailers that are cobbled together from footage from other stuff and presented as if it's a legit trailer for some either upcoming or even unannounced project. Uh, and that's popping up in my notifications. That's definitely a bait and switch. I've also seen things where people have kind of taken a click bade approach to stuff like a SMR videos. Now I've been watching a SMR videos for a really long time. Law of time listeners will remember I once interviewed a s MR artist, Heather Feather, who hasn't been active in a few years, but was one of the pioneers really in the a s m R field back in the day. Well, a lot of those videos now have thumbnails that are meant to be extremely provocative in some way or another. Uh, some of which are kind of sexualized, some of which appear to suggest violence. It's kind of crazy when you think that a SMR is really supposed to be about like relaxing and and chilling out, and I see these videos like this. This doesn't seem to be sending the message of chilling out to me. But whatever. Anyway, a lot of that just means that these artists are following one of are seen to be best practices. They are the way to get people to click. So it's not necessarily that they want to do this, or at least not that they, you know, set out to do this, but rather this is one of the ways where you stand out and you get people to click on your work and hopefully enjoy it, even though the work may not be reflective of whatever you use to lure them in the first place. That's the danger, right If you feel that the thing you are served is not the same thing you were promised, you're likely to be a little upset. But I get it. You know, traffic amounts to revenue, so you've got to get folks in the door, and the Internet is a vast treasure trove of content. Some of that content is good or even really good, a lot of it's mediocre, and some of it is really bad, and it could be stuff. It would be really tough to stand out, even if you are putting out great, great content, so you've got to use all the tricks you can. It's something I've never been particularly good at. Now. There are a few other related things we can chat about briefly that kind of fall into these content buckets, whether it's content farm or click bait. A big one of those, at least in my mind, are quizzes and galleries. You don't see that as often. There's still some sites that take the gallery approach, and I hate it, but I understand why it's happening, just like I understand why quizzes are so popular. So the reason why quizzes and galleries are beloved by content farm like entities is that they represent a potentially large number of clicks for a potentially low investment. Like let's talk about a quiz. Let's say a quiz is twenty questions long, but the way you make the quiz is that each question is its own little web page, and you choose like maybe it's a multiple choice answer. You choose your multiple choice answer, you hit next, and then you get the next question. Now, in your experience, what you're doing is you're just answering questions and getting the next one. But what's going on, you know, from a business perspective, is that every single time you're answering a question, jen you're loading a new web page. Every time you load a new web page, that's an opportunity to serve you and add and every time you keep on going through those quizzes, uh, then you start ranking up those page views. It's a great way for page views to go through the roof very quickly. If you write really good quizzes, and by good I mean sticky, like people want to answer them. They'll go on and they'll start taking the next quiz after they get the first one, and they'll just keep on going and those numbers keep on going up. So that is incredibly attractive to websites that that host a lot of content. It means that they, you know, if they're getting their web advertising based on page views, then that's a way to really drive those page views up. Same with galleries, where it would be like a slide show where you've got a picture and then you hit next. Well, it's not just that it's reloading a new picture, right, You're not just getting a new photo. That's actually counting as a whole new page view. So from an advertising perspective, you just went from someone who gave one page view to two page views, and you keep clicking through those page views goes up, go up and up. A lot of content companies out there present their articles in a slide show approach, which gets a little gross. Back at how stuff works, we did galleries and we did quizzes toward the end of my time at how stuff works, not so much in the beginning. And the beginning it was more articles. But even then we would arrange our articles in pages. Uh. The idea being that it would get kind of intimidating if the article was all in one unbroken page, because you'd just be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, particularly for really dense topics. So we would organize our our material by pages and we'd say, all right, well we're gonna talk about one specific thing about this, you know, in my case technology, I'm going to dedicate a whole page each to this, and then the next page will be the next part about this and the pages were you know, they were long. They weren't. It wasn't like a paragraph. Um. But we also gave the opportunity for people to use the print article feature, which wouldn't immediately send it to the printer, but it would give you the full article in one page view and you wouldn't, you know, click next page, next page, next page. So we did give people that option. Um. But yeah, like as we started doing things like introducing quizzes and galleries, I got a little squeaked out by that because I felt like it was almost like we were trying to trick page views out of folks. I mean, they were getting stuff too, like they were getting an experience as well, but it never felt like it was in the same spirit as the articles were. So I always felt uneasy about it. Anyway. That's the whole story around content farms and click bait from that conceptual level why they exist. Uh, they can get really exasperating and you're a user, When you're a consumer and you're just trying to find something good, Uh, they get really frustrating. There are entire YouTube channels that are just dedicated to churning out video after video after video of crap content, sometimes misleading content, like it'll be something that is fake but not expressed that it's fate, so it's presented as true to the audience. I'm thinking of a lot of cooking videos actually fall into that category. In fact, how to Cook channel is fantastic because the host of that channel, she takes time to go through some of the viral videos in the cooking field and talk about how those are misrepresenting what you can and can't do with food. It's a fantastic channel, great for critical thinkers. So I hope you enjoyed this. It was gonna be a tidbit, but now I'm looking at my recording and I'm already up to like thirty six minutes, So this was a longer tidbit than I thought. It just shows that I'm a chatter box. However, we'll be back with more episodes of tech stuff throughout the week. Tomorrow we should have a new news episode, and then we'll have some new episodes next week. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech stuff, whether it's a tidbit, maybe it's a topic in tech that doesn't merit a full episode, but you're just curious about it, you want to hear my thoughts, let me know. Or if there's some trend in technology or specific company or specific type of tech, anything like that that you want to know about, you can let me know that as well. The best way to get in touch with me is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.