There is a new and undermining threat to the World Wide Web: a slowly rising tide of “original content” on Internet sites that is at best worthless, and at worst possibly even dangerously inaccurate. Understanding what’s happening requires a lesson in modern Web economics. If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you’ve set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance. Then, to get your site ranked high in search engines, it’s best to have “original content” about whatever the subject of your site happens to be. The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for. But it can’t be just an outright copy of what’s on some other site; you get penalized for that by search engines. Hence, there has been an explosion of demand for “original content”; Charles Ryder, of WCR Internet Marketing, a consulting firm, says Web masters everywhere want articles written for them and will supply the search engine-friendly keywords to include. You’d think this would be a godsend for writers. Think again… Curious to learn more about the process, I looked at some writing jobs on the web sites where these transactions occur. In this market, I found a web entrepreneur, by the name of “Whirlywinds.” I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything. A topic could be ‘colloidal silver’. But then the added caveat: “Please EXCLUDE any negative comments, as I sell this product online.” Colloidal silver is one of those bits of medical quackery that thrive on the unregulated Web. Even better material: “bird flu”. Storyline: describe “where it hibernates for hundreds of years… how quickly it mutates to infect other animals… how it mutates so that it can be passed from human to human.” After some hard work, one could come up with a useful introduction to the topic. Starting from this template, one of these entrepreneurs will have the writer produce a number of permutations on the piece. This essentially is another assignment, asking to rewrite some other “content” on bird flu. The composition of content is grabbed together from sites like – in this case – the World Health Organization, New Scientist and WebMD. The job, is in fact, to make enough small changes to the text for the entrepreneurs to be able to pass it off to search engines as their own. Which is, in fact, what most of the “original content” on these sites turns out to be: cut-and-paste jobs with superficial modifications. At $2 an article, tops, that’s all anyone can afford to provide — even in India and Eastern Europe, where most of this work gets done. The point of all this isn’t to complain that writers are underpaid and overworked; that’s old news. It’s also not to bust these businesses; there are thousands of them out there. My beef, actually, is with the search engines and the economics of the modern Web. Google, for example, says its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The way that’s written, one thinks perhaps of a satellite orbiting high above the earth, capturing all its information but interfering with nothing. In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it. Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world’s “information.” Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations. Nothing very useful about that.
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