They're not content farms. They're attention mines

22 Jul

There has been a lot of talk recently about how ‘content farms’ are destroying the news (and other media) businesses.  But referring to companies like Demand Media as ‘content farms’ misses the central point.

What is novel about their approach is not that they mass produce content or commoditize information like an industrial farm churns out corn. News organizations as commercial enterprises have been generating huge amounts of content at an industrial scale for some time now.  Newswires boil this content down to an even more commoditized format, suitable for publishing in any market.

What is new about companies like Demand is not that they’re farming content but rather that they are mining for attention.  

I was recently on a panel with one of their executives and he referred to an article they produced that described how you make a dog vomit. For most of us, most of the time, this kind of information is useless at best.  But for a small portion of the population for a brief moment in their lives, they will need this information because it may save the life of their dog.  For those moments, knowing how to get your pet to puke is more important than what is happening in Iraq or The Gulf.

These stories don’t compete for the same moment of attention in the audience. What Demand is doing is drilling down into the collective attention of the audience and finding these ‘nuggets’ of interest. If they can sell ads up against them then they produce the piece.

So they churn out a lot of these stories and they service previously unknown information needs but if the news business is worried about them eating their lunch then the news businesses identity crisis is even more profound than we might have feared.

What’s more, by ignoring the innovative value of attention mining and focusing on the quality of material that derives from this analysis, the news business is missing an important opportunity to both (a) tap into what people are looking at; and (b) demonstrate their journalistic craftsmanship. This is an opportunity and not a threat for traditional media.

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8 Responses to “They're not content farms. They're attention mines”

  1. Jordan Matthew Yerman 23. Jul, 2010 at 12:16 am #

    “How to wear a sweater vest”.

  2. Michael Tippett 23. Jul, 2010 at 1:17 am #

    I wear mine on a hanger in my closet. Damned thing just always seemed so complicated.

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