Both are based on an unlimited supply of inventory, sorted and targeted through smart algorithms that key off user behavior. Both are low-cost, low-yield, very high volume businesses. Both are site-agnostic, and indeed will do better the more sites they are spread across.

Ad networks have come to define the “base of the pyramid” for online display advertising. They are used by marketers at virtually all the best brands (with a few exceptions that prove the rule), and the vast majority of top-shelf media brands, as well as the long tail of sites everywhere.

Will content farms likewise become so pervasively used as filler on all media sites (a la USA Today)?

The one thing in the mix that might push back against this low-cost content creep is Google’s moves to reduce the SEO love to undistinguished, long-tail content like that of Associated Content and Demand Media. Here’s a link on that, which must be sending shivers up some spines at Yahoo: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-googles-may-day-update-what-it-means-for-you

And even the original stories, frankly, often consist of little more than adapting a press release and possibly gathering a handful of quotes. While there are truly great news organizations out there like the New York Times, I don’t think it makes sense to put the old media on a pedestral simply because they play by the rules of a format we might be more accustomed to at this point in history.

If we can put the aggregation issue aside, along with the (for me) annoying celebrity/ tabloid content (and believe me, we’re not spared from trashy ads over here either), there is something interesting that I think the Huffington Post has done, which is to bring an unapologetically left-wing slant to mainstream American news coverage (the mirror to this being something like the Drudge Report). Whether the ramifications of this are ultimately good or bad, clearly the content people are absorbing is different whether aggregated or not.

Look at how openly Huffington Post, for example, compared to old media news organizations, criticized Israel during the recent incident. Whether you agree or disagree with that viewpoint, it is entirely new for many people and would have been unheard of ten years ago. In covering the financial meltdown, they offered frequent front-page opinion pieces by James Kwan, a respected economist critical of the establishment approach whose views would not typically make the front page of a paper.

So, insomuch as the framing matters in terms of journalism, and clearly it does, I think there’s a fairly big shift occurring here. An even more radical model are user-centered sites like Daily Kos (or perhaps even Digg), which also aggregate existing content 90% of the time, but present it through the viewpoint of the readers themselves.

Taken alone, you might end up with a fairly rigid view of the world getting your news through one of these sites. But to me, it’s a mix of hard news like NYT, opinion journalism, and citizen journalism that provides the most interesting, and hopefully the most complete picture.

The content farms on the other hand are far less interesting, and I would simply lump them in with other forms of advertising right now. Advertisers will always adapt their tactics where there’s an opportunity, and autogenerated content is simply a product of that – but my guess would be that these sites generate most of their traffic from searches, and not from a recurring reader base.

Google became its own worst enemy by valuing a metric which is simple to counterfeit and mass produce. And while Google’s posse, including the infamous Matt Cutts, beat their chest over Google’s ability to differentiate high quality backlinks from low quality backlinks, their inability to leverage this into better search results continues to feed the quantity-over-quality content beast.
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In respect to the United States and our place in the world, it’s very sad to look in the mirror and see what we’ve become. Only 10 years ago I was in France which had not yet adopted the internet as we know it, but instead was running on it’s own proprietary network. Amazing to see what a short 10 years mixed with a pinch of vision can accomplish. Frankly, we’ve forgotten how to live, we’ve forgotten how to play, and we no longer take care of our own. At this rate we’ll be the first country profiled on VH1s “Where Are They Now?”
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In respect to the Huffington Post, perhaps they should blur their content and leave the assholes plainly visible…or maybe that is exactly what they are doing.

This is a US content site; there is an implicit assumption by EU advertisers and agencies that regional / local ads underperform on US content sites even if the user’s IP address is in France. So instead of Orange ads you get un-targeted lowest-common-denominator advertisements.

HuffPro likely has a two tiered selling strategy where premium ads they sell in-house are supplemented by ads from third party sources when needed. It is highly likely that this is just an anomaly / a bad ad was approved by mistake. HuffPo would likely rather serve a non-paying house ad than this type of ad to protect their brand.

[This one I know may not be popular - but it is true]

The EU / UK is shooting themselves in the foot with respect to facilitating premium display advertising. If marketers cannot easily use cookies to better target You (EU cookie directive) You are going to see more and more of these lowest-common-denominator advertisements. I’m not talking about privacy mind you; I am talking about cookies. Uncertainty is likely limiting the adoption of advance targeting in EU countries – you would not see this type of ad on HuffPo in the US.

It’s happening, more or less, on Twitter at the moment.I can’t predict how Twitter will evolve, but for the moment, anyhow, the humans seem to be fairly successful in dodging the bots and “curating” the rest of the World Wide Web.

Also, I don’t see how Apple defines markets by geographic area has anything to do with your argument. They aren’t going to make individual bases for relatively smaller markets, even if you traveled there on vacation sometime. Geographic location makes sense for shipping, and for the EU it makes sense for laws etc.

Frederic, I find it amusing that you seem to hold smh.com.au up as one of the exemplars of quality journalism. This is sort of true at 8am in the morning when most of the site’s content is from the more traditionally curated print edition. As the day progresses (and I live in Sydney so I watch it more or less continuously throughout the day) it becomes a mess of at-the-minute sensation stories, crappy wire stories rotated through the landing page to keep it ‘fresh’ (with crap), and laughable Apple-related link-bait stories designed to harvest click-throughs and tedious comment flaming. In a gutlessly thin-skinned policy, the comments themselves are moderated, so commenters can’t even call out SMH for its shoddy blog-recycling on its own site – at least some newspapers have the courage allow adverse comment about their own reporters and stories at their very worst (see this hilarious example: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7800676/10-reasons-not-to-buy-Apples-new-iPhone-4G.html)

From a usability point of view, the site is a disaster. It’s a Flash-heavy, popover-laden advertisement minefield with poor differentiation between content and ads, intrusive auto-playing video and those really annoying vertical banners in the left and right margins that make it impossible to click on a blank part of the browser window (to bring focus to it) without triggering the advertisement. All of this I have to tolerate during the day because I don’t have a flash blocker at work (yeah, I know, boo hoo).

If Fairfax is an example of a well-executed digital strategy fr quality journalism, then I’ll be damned. There’s daylight between SMH and the NY Times in every respect – quality, design, originality, you name it. Even the paper edition of the SMH is a pale rendition of the once-great masthead whose Saturday edition I used to buy when I lived in another city to see me through the weekend. Fairfax’ recent positive cashflow is surely because it has become more like an aggregator, not less. Please don’t mention these two papers in the same breath any longer!

And BTW, seriously? You could not possibly expect me to read such a long and stilted article just because you saw something about farts.

pfffffffffftttttttt