WSJ on 'made-for-ads' Web content

These publishers make money when search engine users click through to their sites, then click on the ads served there. Gomes writes:

"Search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.

"Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world's "information." Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations."

Call these publishers "spammy" and "junky," if you will. But they are not "boorish." There's nothing clumsy about their work -- it is shrewdly calculated to make them money, using the rules of the game, as dictated by the search engines.

Legitimate news publishers can play the same game -- and win. But journalists have to be willing to restructure the way they produce content to publish it in forms that will be better recognized by both automated search agents and web-savvy human readers.

Links to this article: Technorati, Yahoo