Earlier this week, Yahoo purchased Associated Content for about $100 million, giving Yahoo an enormous library of inexpensive, search-engine optimized content and the means to produce much more of it. Associated Content is usually described as a content farm or content mill, but you could certainly pick many other descriptors for its model: the mass production of low-cost and, I would argue, low-quality articles.
Remember those Chinese factories that made cheap Mattel toys that had be recalled? Well, this is the digital publishing version of that. But instead of producing toys with poisonous lead paint or tiny magnets that will break off and choke your kid, Associated Content and its army of more than 300,000 writers like JerseyNana (pictured)–who generally get paid between $3 and $7 per article– might tell you how to dislodge a cheap toy from as asphyxiating infant’s throat. A good chunk of the more than 2 million articles published since the company’s launch in 2005 attempt to deliver practical information on subjects like health, cars, technology and entertainment.
Much as BP has impacted the Gulf of Mexico, Associated Content’s gusher has changed the ecosystem of the web. By nature of its Google-friendly headlines, Associated Content stories often hog top search results on many common queries.
That’s one of the qualities that attracted Yahoo as it faces off with AOL, which recently announced its own plans to get into the content agribusiness to replace the cratered dial-up internet access business it was built on, how-to-video studio Demand Media, Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, and, of course, major destinations in each specialty field, from ESPN to WebMD, who all participate in the great scrum for search-result dominance.
Naturally, Associated Content has its critics, who can be divided into two classes: those offended by the low payment given authors and those offended by the utter drek it often produces. In interviews following the deal, Yahoo executives were quick to defend the quality of the newest addition to its portfolio. Said Yahoo Media VP James Pitaro, “They have very good quality across all media. I would say quality is their main differentiator. Their editorial process is more rigorous than what we expected.”
Given the low cost and, uh, democratic editorial approach, this is clearly a claim worth vetting. So I spent some time wandering the rows of Associated Content’s contentfield to sample the new inventory Yahoo will be offering its advertisers.
What I found was a blend of bland conventional wisdom, salt-of-the-earth pontificating, off-the-cuff quackery, jumbled grammar, awful logic, failure narratives, and straight-up weirdness that will one-day offer unparalleled fodder university courses in narratology and epistemology, assuming of course that those fields don’t get boiled down to Associated Content articles.
Click through for a few representative articles:
