Stop trying to make content farms happen
RushTok, Wirecutter, "I'm Just Ken," T Swift tour emails and more AI journalism
I filed my first “story” for Demand Media in November 2010, just two months before the world’s preeminent content farm took itself public. I was a broke college junior, fresh off an unpaid summer internship that I’d subsidized with a series of ever-more-eccentric part-time jobs, and SEO writing at least sounded more like my chosen profession than waitressing at high-end weddings and bar mitzvahs.
All I had to do was claim a barely edited search string from the thousands of nonsense assignments in the Demand writer portal, Google the topic for a few minutes and vomit up a passable 400 words on subjects such as “How to Create a Black & White Decorative Car for My Parents' Special Day,” “Safety of GFC Kilns” and “Explanation of Floating Flywheels.” (All real assignments that I completed!)
Demand, in turn, would then copy-edit this — ahem — “commercially valuable content,” throw it up on Livestrong or eHow, and deposit $7.50 into my Paypal account. When future Googlers searched for kilns or flywheels, they’d inevitably end up on a Demand Media site. For this jaw-dropping innovation, the company was briefly valued more highly than The New York Times.
From the beginning, however, Demand Media was essentially a massive bait-and-switch: Readers came to sites like eHow for authoritative answers … and instead found ads (SO MANY ads) and a scrap of aggregation by a hungover student. In 2011, Google changed its algorithm to downrank Demand and competing content farms, effectively choking off their traffic. Within a year, unique visitors to Demand sites dropped by almost 60%.
And yet — because AI added to any business model automatically makes that model ~innovative~ — media people are once again trying to make content farms happen. This time they’ve come for local news, where a five-year-old tool called LedeAI kicked off a minor scandal last week when reporters noticed newspaper chain Gannett using it to recap high school football games.
You can see why these recaps might offend reporters: They raise the specter that AI could replace human journalists, and they’re also … very bad. But like many new entrants to the exploding field of AI content-farming, LedeAI doesn’t want to do journalism. Journalists don’t cover these games as it is.
Instead, LedeAI’s pitch to newsrooms is that it will help them eke out a little more ad revenue, and a few more potential subscribers, by aggregating clicks across an AI-generated buffet of cheap, poorly trafficked, super-niche sports content.
“There’s no way to overstate this,” the company’s website reads. “Adding Lede AI sports coverage and broadening coverage areas creates an audience-acquisition machine.”
I don’t doubt that’s true — but I’d also point out that it didn’t get Demand and its ilk very far. No one wants an internet cluttered with crap content, whether authored by a college kid or a robot.
If you read anything this weekend
“Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule,” by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker. This is so very long and exhaustive (exhausting?) that I did not, in all candor, read every word — especially the part where Farrow waxes kinda Freudian about Musk’s childhood. But you’ll find no better unspooling of Musk or his startling, unseen influence across modern society, from war and politics to workplace safety policies.
“Culture Study Meets Bama RushTok,” by Anne Helen Petersen for Culture Study. This excellent, illuminating RushTok explainer — bits of which have taken up permanent residence in my head — doubles as a teaser for Petersen’s forthcoming unnamed/unspecified RushTok project.
“The Fight Over What’s Real (And What’s Not) on Dissociative Identity Disorder TikTok,” by Jessica Lucas for The Verge. A top psychiatrist went to (inadvertent) war with TikTok’s mental health community after suggesting that some DID influencers fake multiple personalities.
“What Happened to Wirecutter?,” by Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic. This felt slightly under-reported and unsatisfying to me, rather like a latter-day Wirecutter rec. I can’t possibly base a major decision on a single workday’s worth of research … even if a staff writer for a major publication is the person doing it (!).
“The Triumph of ‘I’m Just Ken,’ the ‘Barbie’ Movie’s Bonkers Summer Hit,” by Ashley Fetters Maloy for The Washington Post. There’s an 80% chance this song’s playing though my head in any given moment.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this NYT #longread on the racist Instagram account that divided a California high school.
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Postscripts
AI enters the culture wars. “Going shopping” is dead. How viral cooking videos took over the world and how online reviews got so broken. The soldiers gaming their way through war. A song for every minute of the day. Stunt journalism at its (aptly) most pointless/inane.
Antivaxxers never saw the microchips coming … in their CHEESE. Abortion clinics ranked by privacy protections. How to delete your Twitter history. Last but not least: Pretty much everything the new 404 Media has published thus far is both great and terrifying. (Except for this Taylor Swift email leak,1 which is great and … sparkly!)
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin
As a side note: I’m currently en route to Mexico City to see Taylor Swift (… and also, to be clear, go on vacation). If you have Eras tour tips or friendship bracelet ideas, plz send them!