Is Content the New Form of Advertising?

There are many articles on the Web, and many of them are premium content. Over the past few years, however, the Web has become flooded with subpar articles through sites such as Huffington Post and Demand Media.

The articles that are created on sites like these are not considered premium content. They were created by repurposing premium content and tricking Google’s search algorithm. They may be at the end of the road, however, because Google has learned of their tricks and their simple content is no longer going to work for them.

Why is the Content Considered Subpar? If you read a how-to article and it lists the steps in chronological order but gives no explanation whatsoever, it would be considered subpar. A good how to article will have full explanations, as well as videos and diagrams to back it up. Subpar news articles are written by repurposing worthy news articles. The writer of the article will mostly quote other people instead of writing a newsworthy article himself.

Subpar articles are also written to retarget for financial gain. For instance, when you visit some websites a cookie is placed on your computer. That website will then pay good money to show you an ad to bring you back to their site again at a later time. You may not even notice what is going on, but behind the scenes big money is being spent to get you back there.

Articles are written with advertising in mind, not great content. They only care about the user seeing the ad; they don’t care if they read the content on the site. Why should they? The content is not premium and original. It is simplistic and subpar and not worthy of reading anyway. This is called retargeted ads. They don’t care if the visitor likes the content, as long as they revisit the site again.

A top brand marketer, on the other hand, cares more about the content around their ads. They would not use a content mill, but would pay much more to have original premium content on their site.

Moving Back to Premium Content

Things are changing and premium content is making its way back to the Web. The Huffington Post is now hiring premium writers from the BBC and New York Times. Demand Studios recently let go many of their contract writers. YouTube is making a shift from simple user submitted videos to more premium videos.

Google has made some big changes to stop subpar content on the Web. The Google Panda search algorithm is made so that it returns only premium content, and no duplicated content. If they find duplicate content, it is basically pushed down the list of search results and will never make it back to the first page.