Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: and how the tech area for today's text stuff tidbits.
Speaker 1: That's the new thing I'm doing on Wednesdays where I
Speaker 1: do a shorter topic. I thought I would talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about content farms and click bait, and I
Speaker 1: think of these as kind of like cousins. So we'll
Speaker 1: start with the concept of content farms. Now, to understand
Speaker 1: how content farms became a thing, it's necessary to talk
Speaker 1: about web advertising and search engines because those are the
Speaker 1: two components that made content farms a viable business idea.
Speaker 1: So here's the super short version of web advertising. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it involves making deal with some sort of advertising entity
Speaker 1: where that entity will give you money in exchange for
Speaker 1: allowing the entity to put up advertising on your site
Speaker 1: in some way. Now, usually that money is actually contingent
Speaker 1: upon some other criteria, not just that you allow them
Speaker 1: to take up landscape, because that's just not good enough.
Speaker 1: If no one ever goes to your web page, then
Speaker 1: the ad is doing nothing. It's it's like if you
Speaker 1: put a billboard up in the middle of the Sahara
Speaker 1: desert where nobody goes. So web advertising quickly adopted a
Speaker 1: few different models, and I'll give a few examples. So
Speaker 1: one was just based on page views, so the advertiser
Speaker 1: would get data about how many people had visited that
Speaker 1: web page in a given amount of time, and they
Speaker 1: might also get a little more data such as, you know,
Speaker 1: how much time the average person spent on the page.
Speaker 1: And generally speaking, the more people who visit, the longer
Speaker 1: that they stay on a page, the more valuable the
Speaker 1: page is uh and the more likely they are, obviously
Speaker 1: to encounter or even perhaps act upon advertising. So you've
Speaker 1: got a lot of different concepts wrapped up in here.
Speaker 1: You would typically have a uh, you know, a per
Speaker 1: thousand deal for views. So you might say like, okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll pay you five dollars per thousand views this
Speaker 1: web page gets, because that means one thousand times people
Speaker 1: saw are at You also had the concept of how
Speaker 1: much you could demand for those thousand views, right if
Speaker 1: people you know, if you could show that people come
Speaker 1: to your page and they spend twenty minutes on it,
Speaker 1: that would be phenomenal. That would be an incredibly long
Speaker 1: time for someone to spend on a web page that's
Speaker 1: not say a social network platform or something like YouTube.
Speaker 1: Then you could demand higher prices for those thousand views,
Speaker 1: whereas if people you would come to your page and
Speaker 1: then almost immediately bounce, you would probably only be able
Speaker 1: to get a small amount per a thousand views. So
Speaker 1: all of that factors in right. And of course there
Speaker 1: are other advertising models as well, uh, such as ones
Speaker 1: that pay out not on page views but on user
Speaker 1: actions such as clicking through the ad to go to
Speaker 1: a related product or service page, or in some cases,
Speaker 1: actually making a purchase following such an action, So like,
Speaker 1: not only did they click through the ad, they bought something,
Speaker 1: and that's where the revenue comes from for the person
Speaker 1: who's allowing the ad to be on their page. So
Speaker 1: that forms the basis of making revenue on the web
Speaker 1: at that basic level. There are obviously many other ways
Speaker 1: to do it, but generally speaking, the web advertisement side
Speaker 1: is the revenue side. The search engine bit that's the
Speaker 1: discovery side, that's the opportunity, that's how you get the
Speaker 1: people to your stuff. And if we get meta and
Speaker 1: we start looking at web traffic, we can actually start
Speaker 1: to see what people are looking for. And if you
Speaker 1: know what folks are looking for, then you can try
Speaker 1: and meet that need. So there are a lot of
Speaker 1: web analytics out there where you can actually find things
Speaker 1: like how many people searched for a certain term, Like
Speaker 1: there's Google trends right where you can look and see
Speaker 1: what people are looking for. And if a lot of
Speaker 1: people are looking for something and there aren't a lot
Speaker 1: of great options to go to to see that something,
Speaker 1: there's an opportunity there. Well, this is interesting because you know,
Speaker 1: I you can call me a content creator. I actually
Speaker 1: don't like that term. I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: use it, but it seems so like, uh, robotic to me,
Speaker 1: Like there's no there's no humanity in the in the
Speaker 1: terms content creator as far as I can tell. But
Speaker 1: maybe I'm just projecting too much. Anyway, if you think
Speaker 1: of someone who creates stuff on the web, they might
Speaker 1: come at that from one of many different ways. Maybe
Speaker 1: they they're doing it because they have a true passion
Speaker 1: for whatever it is they do, and they just follow
Speaker 1: that passion and that's why they're creating the thing they create. Uh,
Speaker 1: that to me feels really you know, pure and lovely
Speaker 1: and I love seeing those kinds of people on the
Speaker 1: web and I love seeing them flourish. There are others
Speaker 1: who they want to create. They don't have a specific
Speaker 1: passion they want to follow, but they want to create
Speaker 1: because they think think that's the way they want to
Speaker 1: make a living. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not saying that this is lesser than So
Speaker 1: they're not necessarily following their passion for any particular topic. Rather,
Speaker 1: they are looking to see what topics are people interested in,
Speaker 1: and then they go out to cover those topics in
Speaker 1: order to meet that need. Like they think, well, why
Speaker 1: can't I be the person to create this thing that
Speaker 1: people want to see? And again, there's nothing wrong with that. Um,
Speaker 1: it's just a different method of going about it. And
Speaker 1: I also don't know. I don't know. I consider myself
Speaker 1: more of the first category than the second category. I
Speaker 1: don't know how sustainable that is over the long run, right,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you would burn out faster if
Speaker 1: you were just constantly trying to meet the the needs
Speaker 1: of your identified audience. Anyway, this would mean that sites
Speaker 1: what could do things like, uh, look around at analytics
Speaker 1: and see that maybe people are looking for information about
Speaker 1: how to, I don't know, hook up a toe hitch
Speaker 1: to a truck. I'm not giving that example for any
Speaker 1: specific reason, but if you ask me about it in person,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you the specific reason. Anyway, you then decide
Speaker 1: you're gonna make a dash for creating an online resource
Speaker 1: that at least claims to show how to hook up
Speaker 1: a toe hitch to a truck. And you know that
Speaker 1: since people are searching for it, they're bound to find
Speaker 1: yours because you already saw that there's actually a lack
Speaker 1: of resources out there. Now, remember this is like, you know,
Speaker 1: more than a decade ago at this point, But creating
Speaker 1: the piece not isn't that necessarily enough on its own?
Speaker 1: Like that, you know, just because you wrote something doesn't
Speaker 1: mean it's going to rank well. So you also need
Speaker 1: to make sure that piece shows up pretty high up
Speaker 1: in search results. So you practice something called search engine
Speaker 1: optimization or SEO, and you use a bunch of different
Speaker 1: strategies to give your page a good chance to rank
Speaker 1: high on search results on engines like Google. In fact,
Speaker 1: you would probably only focus on Google because so much
Speaker 1: search traffic goes through the Google engine. If the majority
Speaker 1: of the people are using Google to search stuff, then
Speaker 1: it just makes sense to focus your efforts there. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to go and focus on smaller search engines
Speaker 1: because even if you did well, you'd still only be
Speaker 1: getting a fraction of the traffic that Google could send you.
Speaker 1: So you focus on Google. Back in the day, Google
Speaker 1: was actually you know, easy to gamify, easy, being in
Speaker 1: quotation marks easier, I guess I should say, and uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, most folks don't ever bother to go
Speaker 1: beyond the first page of search results. In fact, a
Speaker 1: lot of people never bother to scroll down below what
Speaker 1: is called the fold. So if you know, whatever you
Speaker 1: see on your on your page when you first do
Speaker 1: a search result, anything below the bottom of the screen
Speaker 1: that's called below the fold, it would require you to
Speaker 1: scroll down to see it. A lot of people don't
Speaker 1: even bother to do that. So you definitely want to
Speaker 1: be in those first couple of results. If you can
Speaker 1: get your article about toe hitches to rank up there,
Speaker 1: you're almost guaranteed to capture a ton of traffic from
Speaker 1: the people who are looking that information up and through
Speaker 1: web advertisements on your page about toe hitches, you can
Speaker 1: generate revenue as more and more people come to the page. Now,
Speaker 1: that's just one little topic. Obviously you couldn't make a
Speaker 1: living off of that. But what if you could scale
Speaker 1: that operation up like big time, Like what if you
Speaker 1: were to hire dozens of writers at a pretty low
Speaker 1: rate of pay. In fact, some content farms would outsource
Speaker 1: articles to writers in countries like the Philippines, where it
Speaker 1: wasn't uncommon for folks to make just a dollar an hour.
Speaker 1: One person said she averaged between five and ten dollars
Speaker 1: an hour writing articles and managed on average to have
Speaker 1: an output of about one article per hour. But then
Speaker 1: there are other content farms that would pay more by
Speaker 1: the word, and that could range like three to five
Speaker 1: cents a word, and that would be for the higher
Speaker 1: paid writers. Of others who were entry level, they might
Speaker 1: be getting a little bit of like a penny and
Speaker 1: a fraction per word. So there is an incentive to
Speaker 1: generate a lot of words, right, because that's how you're
Speaker 1: getting paid. If that's the metric. So some would do
Speaker 1: a per article basis, some would do an hourly basis,
Speaker 1: some would do per word basis. In the United States,
Speaker 1: in two simply hired the average content writer makes around
Speaker 1: thirty four thousand dollars per year today. Uh. Now, keep
Speaker 1: in mind we're also talking about era where content farms
Speaker 1: are not nearly the thing they were a decade ago.
Speaker 1: Thirty four thousand dollars is a hair under the annual
Speaker 1: median personal income for folks in America, so it means
Speaker 1: you would actually be below the median for income. However,
Speaker 1: I should add that this is from again a post
Speaker 1: content farm perspective. Back in the content farm days, the
Speaker 1: content writer average was probably a little bit lower. All right,
Speaker 1: So let's say you can hire a bunch of writers
Speaker 1: for really low wages, so you have a fairly low overhead,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe they make money on a per
Speaker 1: article basis. Maybe part of their compensation is related to
Speaker 1: revenue generated by the article, so that they get essentially
Speaker 1: residuals if the article is really popular. That did happen
Speaker 1: in the cont farm days, at least in some content farms.
Speaker 1: It wasn't applicable to every writer for every content farm,
Speaker 1: but it did happen. So folks who you know, managed
Speaker 1: to hit on something that really did well, they could
Speaker 1: actually potentially make money. A sort of a long tail
Speaker 1: kind of revenue generator where over time they would get
Speaker 1: residual checks, usually not a lot per article, but if
Speaker 1: you write a lot of articles and several of them
Speaker 1: are hits, it could be a nice little source of money. Well,
Speaker 1: the goal is to build out a very large operation
Speaker 1: with relatively low overhead, and you just churn out articles
Speaker 1: based upon web traffic patterns. So it's not that you're
Speaker 1: a website that has a focus, right. That would be
Speaker 1: the the antithesis of a content farm, Like you wouldn't
Speaker 1: typically find a content farm about a specific topic. No,
Speaker 1: content farms would tackle anything and everything largely based upon
Speaker 1: analysis of web traffic. They would flood the Internet with
Speaker 1: tons of articles about stuff where there was a perceived
Speaker 1: gap of information, which again represented an opportunity. The term
Speaker 1: content farm frequently implies that the actual content on the
Speaker 1: site in question is of inferior quality, that, in an
Speaker 1: effort to minimize costs while maximizing effect, writers spew out
Speaker 1: hastily written pieces, perhaps poorly researched, or even just playing
Speaker 1: wrong or useless. Because the goal isn't to produce good work,
Speaker 1: The goal is just to fill those niches in search
Speaker 1: results in order to capture the traffic. This was all
Speaker 1: about pouncing on opportunities that opened up through search, and
Speaker 1: for the writers, particularly those who were paid on a
Speaker 1: per article basis, the motivation was to write more assignments
Speaker 1: to make more money. It was a machine for generating
Speaker 1: substandard work. That's not to say that every piece written
Speaker 1: for a content farm was bad, or that the people
Speaker 1: writing for content farms were ad or sloppy writers. A
Speaker 1: lot of them are quite good. But rather I mean
Speaker 1: to say the nature of the business put very little
Speaker 1: emphasis on quality and a whole lot more emphasis on quantity.
Speaker 1: All right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we will talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about content farms and then click bait. One thing I
Speaker 1: didn't mention before the break is something else the content
Speaker 1: farms became notorious for, which was stealing content from other sites.
Speaker 1: I mean, what's cheaper than paying someone to write an article,
Speaker 1: taking someone else's article, stripping it of some details, and
Speaker 1: then putting it up on your site. In fact, on
Speaker 1: more than one occasion, I would come across one of
Speaker 1: my own articles that I had written for house stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com and I would see that my name
Speaker 1: had been taken off the article, but it was definitely
Speaker 1: my article, like word for word, not even you know, paraphrase,
Speaker 1: but literally just copy and pasted and would even include
Speaker 1: in many cases illustrations that came out of our office.
Speaker 1: We had artists working in our office who would make illustrations,
Speaker 1: and you would even see like how stuff works written
Speaker 1: on the illustrations. In some cases, it was a blatant
Speaker 1: case of plagiarism, and that in itself was difficult to
Speaker 1: deal with because it was popping up all over the place,
Speaker 1: like it was popping up faster than you could take
Speaker 1: action on it. Now, this whole content farm strategy worked
Speaker 1: for as long as ranking and search could be gamified.
Speaker 1: As long as you could reliably get into those top
Speaker 1: search results, then this was open season. Rushing to fill
Speaker 1: the voids would pay off, with some sites ballooning to
Speaker 1: thousands or hundreds of thousands of articles, and dozens of
Speaker 1: new articles would launch every single day, all in an
Speaker 1: effort to dominate search. There was no there's no even
Speaker 1: pretense that these were sites that were trying to get
Speaker 1: people to go to the site on their own and
Speaker 1: then just kind of browse around. Everything on the site
Speaker 1: was engineered to be something that would show up in search,
Speaker 1: and that's how they would get their traffic. Now, I
Speaker 1: want to also say this, when I work for How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works, a lot of our traffic came in through search.
Speaker 1: It turned out that a lot of people were finding
Speaker 1: our articles through search, so we were benefiting from the
Speaker 1: search stuff just like content farms were. We weren't operating
Speaker 1: like a content farm. Heck, I would write when I started,
Speaker 1: I think I wrote one article every two weeks because
Speaker 1: I would have one full week to research and right
Speaker 1: a draft of the article, and I would turn it
Speaker 1: in on a Friday, and I would have the following
Speaker 1: week to revise that article, while I would start a
Speaker 1: second article like the next new one. Uh and on
Speaker 1: the second Friday that's when the article I had been
Speaker 1: working on would go live on the site. So that's
Speaker 1: not a content farm. Like a content farm is churning
Speaker 1: out articles way faster with very little regard to the
Speaker 1: quality of the work. This was great in the short
Speaker 1: term for content farms that you know they were able
Speaker 1: to to get this much traffic, like the fact that
Speaker 1: they were able to gamify the system and to get
Speaker 1: a bunch of writers to create hundreds of articles in
Speaker 1: a short amount of time. It was a great way
Speaker 1: to make money. Uh, it wasn't great, but it could
Speaker 1: be good for the writers, depending upon you know which
Speaker 1: outlets they were working for and what their pay rates
Speaker 1: were for those are outlets. Uh. And it was not
Speaker 1: great for everybody else because it would mean that you know,
Speaker 1: you would be searching for something and you might land
Speaker 1: on a page that, more likely than not, isn't a
Speaker 1: very good quality for whatever it was that you were
Speaker 1: searching for. And it was really really not great for
Speaker 1: Google because Google was having to deal with the fact
Speaker 1: the users were getting disenchanted after encountering so many garbage
Speaker 1: articles that were ranking in Google Search. It was it
Speaker 1: was making Google Search appeared to be unreliable because the
Speaker 1: destinations you were going to we're pretty crappy. So in fact,
Speaker 1: I guess I can talk about this now. Um way
Speaker 1: back in the day, who I was still a writer
Speaker 1: for how stuff works dot com, there was a point
Speaker 1: where Google representatives actually reached out to me asking if
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works might produce articles in specific areas because
Speaker 1: the search engine needed to direct people to higher quality articles.
Speaker 1: So they actually handed me a list of topics that
Speaker 1: they said we need we need better version articles out
Speaker 1: there because the ones that people are finding are terrible.
Speaker 1: While the articles on how stuff works dot Com were
Speaker 1: and are heavily researched, and the writing staff, like I
Speaker 1: said that, you know, we mainly came from English degrees, right,
Speaker 1: We all studied English lit or or something along those lines,
Speaker 1: you know, and we all had backgrounds in research and
Speaker 1: writing papers with citations and all that kind of fun stuff.
Speaker 1: So Google is trying to push back a bit against
Speaker 1: content farms and to touch base with more respected sites
Speaker 1: to provide higher quality articles that wouldn't be such a
Speaker 1: dragged land on when someone searched for those terms. Now,
Speaker 1: that was potentially an incredibly valuable thing for me to
Speaker 1: receive as someone who produces content. Uh, I mean for
Speaker 1: a search engine to actually say, hey, just so you know,
Speaker 1: folks are really looking for articles about this stuff, but
Speaker 1: they're finding trash. That meant that there was this huge
Speaker 1: opportunity to write better stuff. However, I have to say
Speaker 1: a lot of the topics Google handed to us just
Speaker 1: weren't really how stuff works material. I don't mean they
Speaker 1: were like salacious or anything like that, just that they
Speaker 1: were a bit too niche and mundane and like, there'd
Speaker 1: be no reason to write a how stuff works style
Speaker 1: article on most of those topics. So while it represents
Speaker 1: it an opportunity, we didn't actually really take advantage of it. Anyway.
Speaker 1: Google would later revise its search algorithm to really deal
Speaker 1: with this issue of junk articles more directly. Uh, this
Speaker 1: was more than a decade ago. Like, in my mind
Speaker 1: this happened maybe five years ago, but it's because I
Speaker 1: have lost all concept of time. But no, it happened
Speaker 1: in two thousand eleven when Google launched the Panda algorithm,
Speaker 1: actually named after one of the Google engineers. Uh. The
Speaker 1: purpose of the Panda algorithm was to promote high quality
Speaker 1: sites over junk sites. So if you did a search
Speaker 1: and results were coming up, the search algorithm would now
Speaker 1: UH promote the higher quality sites over the lower quality ones.
Speaker 1: They would rank higher in search. So if you look
Speaker 1: for an article about I don't know chicken salad, whichever
Speaker 1: site Google considered to be the most high quality would
Speaker 1: rank highest. Sites Google identified as hosting thousands of low
Speaker 1: quality articles would get punished by the algorithm UM, often
Speaker 1: totally site wide. So even if that site hosted a
Speaker 1: few really good articles and a lot of content farms
Speaker 1: had really good articles. Even if it had really good articles,
Speaker 1: if the site was mostly filled up with junk articles,
Speaker 1: it was gonna get dinged across the board. So this
Speaker 1: was a huge blow to content farms. Google also released
Speaker 1: a blog post about the algorithm, explaining the criteria that
Speaker 1: they used to determine if a site merits the designation
Speaker 1: of high quality, and it was stuff like, if you
Speaker 1: went to the site and you read the article, would
Speaker 1: you feel like you could trust what the article had
Speaker 1: to say or would the content and presentation of the
Speaker 1: information make you distrust the article. It also looked into
Speaker 1: stuff like whether or not experts or highly qualified writers
Speaker 1: were contributing to the piece. A lot of content farms
Speaker 1: gave little to no information about the people who are
Speaker 1: actually writing the articles, so that would be a blow
Speaker 1: against them. If the site contained a lot of duplicate
Speaker 1: or overlapping article topics where you know, you're just blasting
Speaker 1: maybe a hundred articles about towing, uh, that could ding
Speaker 1: you pretty bad. Now. The Penguin algorithm would follow in
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, and that algorithm aimed at sites that
Speaker 1: created what we're called unnatural back links. Now, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to get into all of that, except to say
Speaker 1: one of the factors that Google's search algorithm would take
Speaker 1: into account back in the day was how many links
Speaker 1: are aiming at a particular web page that pops up
Speaker 1: for a particular search query. So again, let's say the
Speaker 1: search queries chicken salad, and the Google algorithm starts crawling
Speaker 1: the web and pulling all the different hits that relate
Speaker 1: to chicken salad. One of the things that would look
Speaker 1: at is say, how many other sites linked to this
Speaker 1: page about chicken salad. If a lot of sites are
Speaker 1: linking to this page age, then that seems to indicate
Speaker 1: that it's a good page, that it's it's good enough
Speaker 1: to convince other people, Hey, I'm gonna link to this
Speaker 1: because it's worthwhile. And thus Google would draw the conclusion,
Speaker 1: or rather the algorithm would draw the conclusion that this
Speaker 1: must be a better result because a lot of people
Speaker 1: are linking to it. But you could gamify that. You
Speaker 1: can just create tons of back links to your individual pages,
Speaker 1: and by linking to everything, you would appear to boost
Speaker 1: this metric, and Google Search would then say, oh, this
Speaker 1: must be a good article because look at how many
Speaker 1: links are aiming into it. Penguin was meant to fight
Speaker 1: against that. Penguin, as far as I know, was not
Speaker 1: named after the Google engineer like Panda was, and eventually
Speaker 1: both Panda and Penguin were mostly made moot when Google
Speaker 1: launched Hummingbird. Now Penguin and Panda were kind of like
Speaker 1: patching the search algorithm. Hummingbird was a total overhaul to
Speaker 1: Google's search algorithm, and this was also the era where
Speaker 1: you would hear about sites really taking a big hit
Speaker 1: because they had been so dependent upon search traffic, and
Speaker 1: when Google changed the way it handled search results, even
Speaker 1: sites that were considered respectable and high quality ended up
Speaker 1: seeing an enormous change in their traffic from search. And
Speaker 1: when that's how you've based your entire mode of operations
Speaker 1: for years, it's incredibly disruptive. It's also one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why people who have been in content creation for
Speaker 1: a very long time stress the importance that you don't
Speaker 1: put all of your eggs in one basket, right Like,
Speaker 1: you don't put everything that you work on and have
Speaker 1: it depend upon YouTube, because if you did, and Google
Speaker 1: changes the YouTube algorithm and stops suggesting your videos to people,
Speaker 1: who are interested in stuff that you cover. Well, then
Speaker 1: suddenly you your videos just starting getting views anymore. Your
Speaker 1: traffic just dies. This has happened time and time again.
Speaker 1: In fact, it happens almost cyclically. So this was kind
Speaker 1: of a big reminder here the Google search changes. That
Speaker 1: was a big reminder that depending upon a different party
Speaker 1: and their performance to make your business work is incredibly
Speaker 1: risky because if that other party goes out of business
Speaker 1: or changes the way it does things, that has a
Speaker 1: direct impact on you. It's crazy to me how many
Speaker 1: businesses went through that and did not appear to learn
Speaker 1: from that lesson. But anyway, Okay, we've got a little
Speaker 1: bit more to say about content farms and than clickbait.
Speaker 1: But before I get into all that, let's take another
Speaker 1: quick break. Alright. So Google makes these changes to its
Speaker 1: search algorithm, and immediately there's an enormous impact. Traffic to
Speaker 1: sites like content farms dropped dramatically. For one UH company
Speaker 1: that was known for making content farms also sometimes called
Speaker 1: content mills, they saw drop in traffic across all their sites,
Speaker 1: pretty pretty dramatic. Most people just weren't navigating to sites
Speaker 1: like ehal and browsing. I mean again, like it showed
Speaker 1: that the sites were not destinations on their own. Nobody
Speaker 1: was typing in ehal dot com and going to it.
Speaker 1: They were finding stuff through search, and when search stopped
Speaker 1: suggesting it, the traffic really died out. So a lot
Speaker 1: of those sites ended up shutting down. Not Ehal that
Speaker 1: one's stuck around, but again their traffic was hurt pretty badly.
Speaker 1: Now you don't here quite as much about content farms
Speaker 1: these days, though you could argue they still exist, they
Speaker 1: just evolved. Um, but you do hear about clickbait. That
Speaker 1: term originated from a blog post written by a guy
Speaker 1: named Jay Geiger back in two thousand six, and the
Speaker 1: name pretty much tells you everything you need to know
Speaker 1: about what clickbait is. It's something that you see that
Speaker 1: tempts you to click on it. It lures you in
Speaker 1: like bait does on a on a hook. Now, maybe
Speaker 1: that clickbait comes in the form of a provocative thumbnail
Speaker 1: for a YouTube video, usually coupled with an equally provocative title.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's just an outlandish headline for a news article.
Speaker 1: Maybe it appears to answer a question that you could
Speaker 1: have sworn has no answer, and the concept of clickbait
Speaker 1: is of course, way way older than the Internet. The
Speaker 1: same basic idea was used more than a century ago,
Speaker 1: when various newspapers, most of which we're having some sort
Speaker 1: of dubious reputation, would rely upon sensationalized headlines in order
Speaker 1: to sell papers. So this was the era of yellow journalism.
Speaker 1: And of course, back then the goal was to convince
Speaker 1: people to hand over some of their money to buy
Speaker 1: a paper. But the basics remain the same. You use
Speaker 1: tried and true methods to convince folks to take an action,
Speaker 1: even if that action, in this case is just clicking
Speaker 1: through a link. This typically involves appealing to some pretty
Speaker 1: basic human traits. Frequently I see clickbait used in the
Speaker 1: context of a sort of bait and switch, that being
Speaker 1: it's a thing that lures you in, and it turns
Speaker 1: out that the thing that lured you in isn't actually
Speaker 1: present in the thing you really encounter. Golly, I've seen
Speaker 1: bait and switches a lot these days, and in fact,
Speaker 1: they pop up in my Google alerts, which is really frustrating.
Speaker 1: I've got an Android phone and I a little notifications
Speaker 1: about stuff that I might be interested in. Those of
Speaker 1: you who have listened to large Nerdroun Collider know that
Speaker 1: I do a podcast about geeky pop culture stuff, so
Speaker 1: I get a lot of geeky pop culture headlines that
Speaker 1: pop up, including a ton that try to push me
Speaker 1: towards sites that aren't actually news sites. There's one in
Speaker 1: particular that's a YouTube channel that supposedly has trailers for
Speaker 1: stuff well before anyone else does. Except they're not real trailers.
Speaker 1: They're fake trailers. They're trailers that are cobbled together from
Speaker 1: footage from other stuff and presented as if it's a
Speaker 1: legit trailer for some either upcoming or even unannounced project. Uh,
Speaker 1: and that's popping up in my notifications. That's definitely a
Speaker 1: bait and switch. I've also seen things where people have
Speaker 1: kind of taken a click bade approach to stuff like
Speaker 1: a SMR videos. Now I've been watching a SMR videos
Speaker 1: for a really long time. Law of time listeners will
Speaker 1: remember I once interviewed a s MR artist, Heather Feather,
Speaker 1: who hasn't been active in a few years, but was
Speaker 1: one of the pioneers really in the a s m
Speaker 1: R field back in the day. Well, a lot of
Speaker 1: those videos now have thumbnails that are meant to be
Speaker 1: extremely provocative in some way or another. Uh, some of
Speaker 1: which are kind of sexualized, some of which appear to
Speaker 1: suggest violence. It's kind of crazy when you think that
Speaker 1: a SMR is really supposed to be about like relaxing
Speaker 1: and and chilling out, and I see these videos like this.
Speaker 1: This doesn't seem to be sending the message of chilling
Speaker 1: out to me. But whatever. Anyway, a lot of that
Speaker 1: just means that these artists are following one of are
Speaker 1: seen to be best practices. They are the way to
Speaker 1: get people to click. So it's not necessarily that they
Speaker 1: want to do this, or at least not that they,
Speaker 1: you know, set out to do this, but rather this
Speaker 1: is one of the ways where you stand out and
Speaker 1: you get people to click on your work and hopefully
Speaker 1: enjoy it, even though the work may not be reflective
Speaker 1: of whatever you use to lure them in the first place.
Speaker 1: That's the danger, right If you feel that the thing
Speaker 1: you are served is not the same thing you were promised,
Speaker 1: you're likely to be a little upset. But I get it.
Speaker 1: You know, traffic amounts to revenue, so you've got to
Speaker 1: get folks in the door, and the Internet is a
Speaker 1: vast treasure trove of content. Some of that content is
Speaker 1: good or even really good, a lot of it's mediocre,
Speaker 1: and some of it is really bad, and it could
Speaker 1: be stuff. It would be really tough to stand out,
Speaker 1: even if you are putting out great, great content, so
Speaker 1: you've got to use all the tricks you can. It's
Speaker 1: something I've never been particularly good at. Now. There are
Speaker 1: a few other related things we can chat about briefly
Speaker 1: that kind of fall into these content buckets, whether it's
Speaker 1: content farm or click bait. A big one of those,
Speaker 1: at least in my mind, are quizzes and galleries. You
Speaker 1: don't see that as often. There's still some sites that
Speaker 1: take the gallery approach, and I hate it, but I
Speaker 1: understand why it's happening, just like I understand why quizzes
Speaker 1: are so popular. So the reason why quizzes and galleries
Speaker 1: are beloved by content farm like entities is that they
Speaker 1: represent a potentially large number of clicks for a potentially
Speaker 1: low investment. Like let's talk about a quiz. Let's say
Speaker 1: a quiz is twenty questions long, but the way you
Speaker 1: make the quiz is that each question is its own
Speaker 1: little web page, and you choose like maybe it's a
Speaker 1: multiple choice answer. You choose your multiple choice answer, you
Speaker 1: hit next, and then you get the next question. Now,
Speaker 1: in your experience, what you're doing is you're just answering
Speaker 1: questions and getting the next one. But what's going on,
Speaker 1: you know, from a business perspective, is that every single
Speaker 1: time you're answering a question, jen you're loading a new
Speaker 1: web page. Every time you load a new web page,
Speaker 1: that's an opportunity to serve you and add and every
Speaker 1: time you keep on going through those quizzes, uh, then
Speaker 1: you start ranking up those page views. It's a great
Speaker 1: way for page views to go through the roof very quickly.
Speaker 1: If you write really good quizzes, and by good I
Speaker 1: mean sticky, like people want to answer them. They'll go
Speaker 1: on and they'll start taking the next quiz after they
Speaker 1: get the first one, and they'll just keep on going
Speaker 1: and those numbers keep on going up. So that is
Speaker 1: incredibly attractive to websites that that host a lot of content.
Speaker 1: It means that they, you know, if they're getting their
Speaker 1: web advertising based on page views, then that's a way
Speaker 1: to really drive those page views up. Same with galleries,
Speaker 1: where it would be like a slide show where you've
Speaker 1: got a picture and then you hit next. Well, it's
Speaker 1: not just that it's reloading a new picture, right, You're
Speaker 1: not just getting a new photo. That's actually counting as
Speaker 1: a whole new page view. So from an advertising perspective,
Speaker 1: you just went from someone who gave one page view
Speaker 1: to two page views, and you keep clicking through those
Speaker 1: page views goes up, go up and up. A lot
Speaker 1: of content companies out there present their articles in a
Speaker 1: slide show approach, which gets a little gross. Back at
Speaker 1: how stuff works, we did galleries and we did quizzes
Speaker 1: toward the end of my time at how stuff works,
Speaker 1: not so much in the beginning. And the beginning it
Speaker 1: was more articles. But even then we would arrange our
Speaker 1: articles in pages. Uh. The idea being that it would
Speaker 1: get kind of intimidating if the article was all in
Speaker 1: one unbroken page, because you'd just be scrolling and scrolling
Speaker 1: and scrolling, particularly for really dense topics. So we would
Speaker 1: organize our our material by pages and we'd say, all right,
Speaker 1: well we're gonna talk about one specific thing about this,
Speaker 1: you know, in my case technology, I'm going to dedicate
Speaker 1: a whole page each to this, and then the next
Speaker 1: page will be the next part about this and the
Speaker 1: pages were you know, they were long. They weren't. It
Speaker 1: wasn't like a paragraph. Um. But we also gave the
Speaker 1: opportunity for people to use the print article feature, which
Speaker 1: wouldn't immediately send it to the printer, but it would
Speaker 1: give you the full article in one page view and
Speaker 1: you wouldn't, you know, click next page, next page, next page.
Speaker 1: So we did give people that option. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: like as we started doing things like introducing quizzes and galleries,
Speaker 1: I got a little squeaked out by that because I
Speaker 1: felt like it was almost like we were trying to
Speaker 1: trick page views out of folks. I mean, they were
Speaker 1: getting stuff too, like they were getting an experience as well,
Speaker 1: but it never felt like it was in the same
Speaker 1: spirit as the articles were. So I always felt uneasy
Speaker 1: about it. Anyway. That's the whole story around content farms
Speaker 1: and click bait from that conceptual level why they exist. Uh,
Speaker 1: they can get really exasperating and you're a user, When
Speaker 1: you're a consumer and you're just trying to find something good, Uh,
Speaker 1: they get really frustrating. There are entire YouTube channels that
Speaker 1: are just dedicated to churning out video after video after
Speaker 1: video of crap content, sometimes misleading content, like it'll be
Speaker 1: something that is fake but not expressed that it's fate,
Speaker 1: so it's presented as true to the audience. I'm thinking
Speaker 1: of a lot of cooking videos actually fall into that category.
Speaker 1: In fact, how to Cook channel is fantastic because the
Speaker 1: host of that channel, she takes time to go through
Speaker 1: some of the viral videos in the cooking field and
Speaker 1: talk about how those are misrepresenting what you can and
Speaker 1: can't do with food. It's a fantastic channel, great for
Speaker 1: critical thinkers. So I hope you enjoyed this. It was
Speaker 1: gonna be a tidbit, but now I'm looking at my
Speaker 1: recording and I'm already up to like thirty six minutes,
Speaker 1: So this was a longer tidbit than I thought. It
Speaker 1: just shows that I'm a chatter box. However, we'll be
Speaker 1: back with more episodes of tech stuff throughout the week.
Speaker 1: Tomorrow we should have a new news episode, and then
Speaker 1: we'll have some new episodes next week. If you have
Speaker 1: suggestions for topics I should cover on tech stuff, whether
Speaker 1: it's a tidbit, maybe it's a topic in tech that
Speaker 1: doesn't merit a full episode, but you're just curious about it,
Speaker 1: you want to hear my thoughts, let me know. Or
Speaker 1: if there's some trend in technology or specific company or
Speaker 1: specific type of tech, anything like that that you want
Speaker 1: to know about, you can let me know that as well.
Speaker 1: The best way to get in touch with me is
Speaker 1: over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text
Speaker 1: stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.