The idea of ‘filler’ content is nothing new in publishing. Magazines, newspapers, even TV has filler, it’s the stuff that bulks up and fills out your editorial calendar. But online, filler content has the potential for a whole lot more than just plugging gaps, and it all rests on search traffic.
For most online publishers, search traffic makes up a reasonably large bread and butter base of visitors. On our Envato blogs, for example, search traffic generally makes up about 20-30% of visits. That’s a pretty substantial amount of traffic for us, but for some publishing sites those are some really low numbers.
You see there is a way to grow search traffic that has nothing to do with tinkering with the keywords on your articles, or even building link-backs. Instead it’s about publishing masses and masses of content, and that’s where filler content is taken to a whole new level.
Authority Domains, Page Titles and Quantity
Ever notice that when you Google pretty much any topic in the world, Wikipedia will appear somewhere in the top ten search results? That happens because Wikipedia.org is an authority domain. Search ranking algorithms take a slight shortcut in ranking pages and give very heavy weighting to domain names with a lot of link backs, even if the individual page itself is not that important. As it happens Wikipedia is a pretty good source of information on most topics, so this method of ranking works quite well in this example.
Now let’s say you Google “Where is Timbuktu in Africa?” and there is a page out there with those exact words in the title, Google again will give this a pretty high ranking for your query – after all it appears to be a perfect match.
Marry these two ideas together and you will see that if you could get an authority domain with tons of content with a variety of organic titles, you’d be open to receiving a lot, and I mean a lot of traffic. Of course there is also a good chance that you are creating what some pundits are calling information pollution.
Feeding the World’s Demand for Answers
In a recent Wired article ‘The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model‘, author Daniel Roth writes about how companies are using the mixture of Authority Domains and Quantity of Content to make some very big businesses.
Sites ploughing out enormous fields of content have been around for a while, from grand-daddy names like About.com to more modern Stackoverflow.com type sites. Sometimes they are driven by a fairly traditional publishing model, sometimes entirely by user generated content. But they all share the same general ethos: pump out a lot of pages with a lot of subjects on a big domain.
DemandMedia, the focus of Roth’s article, takes these ideas and applies them to publishing at a whole new level. It does this in two ways. The first is in the sheer scale of the operation. At their current size Demand publishes over 100,000 articles and video clips every month. By next year the company plans to step this up by a massive ten times to around 1 million pieces of content per month. To give this some context, Wikipedia has around 3 million English articles at present, in total.
The second part of Demand’s operation is to make the process of choosing what content they produce a whole lot more scientific and systematic. Using an algorithm that processes search trends and ad rates, then combines them with what rankings are attainable based on competition for terms, the company is producing not just a lot of content, but a lot of content that people are actually looking for and that advertisers will pay to place ads on.
Even with over $300m in funding and a reported annual revenue of over $200m, that amount of quantity is going to be difficult to produce with particularly high quality or compensation levels. Unsurprisingly video clips are shot on budgets of $20 and articles get $15. Copy editors come in at $2.50 and fact checkers at just $1 per article.
It’s hard to imagine that these kind of rates attract a lot in terms of quality. But of course, that’s not the name of the game for DemandMedia.
MediaGlow, Aol and a Friendlier Version of Quantity
While I’m impressed by Demand’s ideas and success, they aren’t the most inspiring vision of where web publishing might go. A slightly friendlier alternative is offered by the aging internet giant Aol.
While their dialup business has been slowly rattling through its death coughs, the company has had the good sense to make a plan for the future. Beginning with their insightful acquisition of Weblogs Inc in 2005, along with its very successful stable of names like Engadget and TUAW, Aol has been slowly building their roster of niche publishing sites into an empire, all sitting under the MediaGlow sub-brand.
Where Demand is building mass niche content on the cheap, Aol is taking an economic but only moderately so route. Hiring from the increasingly large pool of talented but redundant print media workers, Aol has been building a very large roster of writers and editors.
The results speak for themselves, nearly 70 million monthly visitors over 80 niche publishing brands and the elevation of this model to underpin the entire Aol strategy as it spins off from parent company Time Warner.
Where DemandMedia is the poster child for quantity, Aol and MediaGlow lean slightly more towards quality, but certainly don’t exemplify it. On the one hand, Saul Hansell—formerly of the NY Times and now AOL’s programming director—was quoted as saying “Aol is just as much as journalistic organization as the New York Times,” (source) but on the other Aol is reportedly trying to buy DemandMedia competitor AssociatedContent. In his post The End of Handcrafted Content, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington laments both approaches and implores publishers to search out new ways of profiting from a quality focus in online publishing.
Quality vs. Quantity – Psdtuts+ vs Tutorial Aggregators
Though I have no experience of publishing at the size of either Aol or Demand, I find the quality vs quantity issue interesting because when we launched our flagship tutorial site Psdtuts+ two and a half years ago, this was exactly the dilemma it faced.
Though Psdtuts+ is far and away the largest Photoshop tutorial blog today with around 2 million visitors a month, it certainly isn’t alone. In fact there are tons and tons of tutorial sites around, so many so that there is a class of meta-content sites called Tutorial Aggregators that exist to funnel all these tutorials to the reader.
The best known aggregator is a site called Good-Tutorials.com and at the time when we launched Psdtuts+ it was already pretty large. I remember wondering if it was such a good idea to be in the rather expensive business of producing long, quality tutorials, when it was possible to get huge amounts of traffic with a mostly automated aggregation system where other people had to do the heavy lifting.
Equally pertinent was the question of whether there was even a market for good quality tutorials where masses of hobbyist material was already abundantly available.
Within a few months of launching however it was very clear that there is a market for quality and it can be profitable. Given that there is only so much information a person can take in, I believe they will generally prefer smaller amounts of higher quality content than buckets of average quality.
A couple of years on and Psdtuts+ has outgrown the aggregators—though they still send substantial traffic—and thanks to advertising and subscriptions it’s even profitable. It’s also one of a growing number of great tutorial sites posting hand crafted, long, detailed and laborious tutorials.
I don’t know if the Psdtuts+ lesson holds true in every type of publishing. But it certainly makes me optimistic that there is room on the web for both quality and quantity operations. It is a pretty big web after all.
Of course a quality AND quantity site… now that would be a thing of beauty!
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