Content farm- another type of user generated content.

In this year February, Google release their new algorithm. Even they didn’t admit, but many people believe that this change was aimed at the “content farm”. So, what is “content farm”? Why Google must to change their algorithm to fight with them? This is a very interesting story to explore.

When the concept "Web2.0" was be presented in 2005, "Data is the Next Intel Inside" was one of the key principles. For instance, Google and Yahoo have the data of users’ search model and database. Amazon and EBay have the data of products and consumer behaviours. These enterprises relied on these data to provide more services and create more information and web traffic from internet users. This situation expounds the importance of data and changes the position from software to data. Data become the king in the internet world. Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder believes data will be the platform of the next era of the web.

On the other hand, another kind of data is user generated content. User generated content also contributes lots of valuable data for enterprises to increase their traffic and earn more revenue such as Reddit, Digg. The web content publishing is no longer confined to the site owner. With the development of blog and wiki, when users browse an articles or a video, some of them may have some feedback, others users may have another feedback or different ideas when they saw these feedback whatever they know each other or not. With these feedback and recommendation, these activities support a power to attract internet users to join in meetings and contribute their thinking. The Maslow's hierarchy of needs which made by an American psychologist Abraham Maslow mentioned that human will pursue the achievements and self- esteem cause human desire further need of self-identity, including the recognition of others. Because of this demand for natural, this may explain why user glad to generated content and it is not too difficult for enterprises to design a motivational and incentives system to enhance this situation.

However, there has a different style of user generated content happen in recently. It is call “content farm”. According to Wiki explained, content farm is to describe companies which employ lot of writer to create various forms of articles with a specific purpose. Demand Media is the best company which develop this business model. This company owns over than 10000 freelance and writers. Demand Media want their writer use the top keyword which published by Google and follow these words to generate articles. These articles possibly will satisfy algorithms rules and get a high rank in the search engine algorithms. They can produce more than 5000 articles per day and attract 86 million unique visits per month. This way can simply bring considerable page views, make user to click their AdSense and attract advertiser to advertise. This is another kind of user generated content.

Nevertheless, the problem of this model is these companies don’t care about the quality of these articles. They just concern with these articles can easily be searched or not. So lots of low quality articles but have high rank happen frequently today. Someone said these kind of data and tricks are no benefit for public when the try to find out information with using search engine. This is the reason that why Google wan to change their algorithm. They believe search engine is to help people find the correct answer, not get lose in large and indifferent content.

References:

Google Tweaks Algorithm to Push Down Low-Quality Sites

Forget Platforms And Applications, Data Is The Real Asset On the Web

Infographic Provides Insight into Demand Media IPO

Will AOL and Demand Media’s Content Farm Strategy Prevail?

Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried

The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model