Following the tech press is always instructive, frequently entertaining, and sometimes alarming. An October article by Daniel Roth in Wired, ‘The Answer Factory,’ falls into that third group.
No writer likes to hear that the divine spark of creativity can be automated, particularly if this innovation is associated with low paying work, but that is exactly what Demand Media has accomplished.
The technology itself is pretty clever. Demand Media hunts through ‘long tail’ search terms, the sort that Google sells cheap. Then it feeds them through a ‘Knowledge Engine’ that determines what other search terms they are connected with, creating a sort of tag cloud.
At this point humans are brought in to arrange the jumble into prospective titles for articles or videos that, according to the algorithm, have a potential audience out there. (Mostly how-to’s of one sort or another.) Finally Demand Media hires writers or videographers to produce an article or video that fits the title.
The work is low paid, but there is a lot of it (and Demand Media pays, quickly and reliably). One videographer has ground out a staggering 40,000 videos – in all, the company has some 170,000 videos on YouTube. In one typical day he shot ten kayaking instructional videos in a couple of hours, earning $20 for each.
Should I be offended or worried by this intellectual assembly line? I’m not. The technology is pretty cool, and it is giving a lot of writers and videographers some steady income. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The articles and videos are not the greatest, but that merely points out an ancient adage that the Internet has not completely changed: By and large, you get what you pay for. And King Content isn’t the first king to have to skimp on the crown.
Tags: Content Creation, New Media, SEO
“…intellectual assembly line”, sounds funny until you think about it; could this be the beginning of a new paradigm where low-end, cheap creative efforts are mass-produced and high-end, expensive creative efforts are handcrafted? Or is that just my weird sense of humor kicking in? Seriously, having an industry instead of just free-lance for writers and videographers might be an interesting future trend that none of us could have predicted even a few years ago.
It is not entirely new. Think of people in Hollywood like Roger Corman, grinding out B pictures. And Dumas hired people to grind out secondary passages of his work.
But having a whole industry for it IS new!