The Ugly Business of Page View Farming
As a key stakeholder in a hand-selected technology blog network, I’ve had a unique view into the evolution of the blogosphere and I can’t say I’m impressed by where it’s going. Thanks to easy money from Google and other blind ad networks, anyone (I won’t call these people bloggers) can make a quick buck by “farming page views”. Similar to the hated practice in online multiplayer games where hoards of low-income workers spend all day farming virtual gold to resell to lazy gamers, page view farmers profit from lazy media buyers, content with blindly forking over cash to Google in exchange for “contextual” clicks.
Since Google and media buyers don’t care where the page view originates, tens of thousands of page view farming sites have cropped up. From the blatant parked domain and plagiarized “blog” to the “link blog” and “copy blog” (featuring a quick comment on whatever is hot online today), these sites are easy to create and even easier to profit from (if you throw up enough of them). But I don’t care how good Google’s algorithms are, a click from a visitor to the parked domain, “cellphones.com” is not valuable to anyone other than the guy that owns the domain.
Even legitimate sites and blogs are guilty of occasional page view farming. Top 10 lists of irrelevant content, hot gadget reviews even though 10,000 other sites posted a similar review and gossip/celebrity slander drive massive amounts of page views. Eventually, advertisers (I know they’re typically way behind the curve, but the Internet has ways of educating even the oldest dinosaurs) will catch on.
Steve Rubel recently commented on this trend coining it “The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging” calling for a return of less-frequent, unique reporting. What Rubel seemed to miss was the motivating factor in the “Lazysphere”—easy money.
Uncov, a wonderful anti-web2.0 blog helps make my point:
“Robert Scoble loses his Facebook account… [and] Google Blog Search has 7,156 results for “scoble facebook”. Evidently, this was (and still is) the talk of the web. I have news for you, though. In the rest of the world, it was business as usual… I didn’t see it in newsstands at the airport. So, look out your office window, take a deep breath, and realize that nobody cares but you.”
Why in the world would over 7,100 people comment on Robert Scoble’s boot from Facebook? Because it drives easy page views. As long as people’s wasted time can be easily monetized, this problem will persist. Whether it’s typing at home, virtual gold farming or adding to the noise of CES coverage, people will always try to make a quick buck. Unfortunately, page view farming is diluting the value of quality, original content (and may even be putting it out of business) and could become the basis of an internet advertising recession if marketers don’t start changing their ways.
There’s a lot more to be said here, but my profit per word is dwindling. Stay tuned for my next post, “Robert Scoble at CES Reviews the Ice-Pooping Robot”.
