As a company who employs researchers who work remotely and charges for the content we send, we paid close attention to this recent article in The Guardian by Danny Bradbury…

Bradbury’s article The word farms of the web highlights a proliferating problem: “websites that mix and match low-quality articles produced by amateurs in order to generate traffic.” Paul Moore of AdsBlackList.com argues that “there’s a fine line between clever search engine optimisation techniques and sites built purely to attract search engines.”

Bradbury draws attention to the legions of unpaid and low-paid writers who contribute content to various sites. Some of these sites provide good content. Bradbury identifies Suite101.com and Helium.com as sites that are on the right track, which give authors a slice of ad revenues generated. But he’s cagey about whether the content is any good, stating that it’s managed with “varying degrees of success.”

It’s fairly clear where a site “sits in [the] spectrum from insightful reporting and well-crafted, thoughtful prose at one end through to machine-generated nonsense at the other,” and to what extent it makes sense to click through on its ads and links. But, Bradly notes, there is a vast middle ground that’s creating the difficulties.

There are two interesting things about this article from our point of view: the way in which value of electronic content is measured, and the way in which people working remotely create that value. With Texperts, we charge for answers, so we have a fairly good idea of the sort of information that people will pay for. We also are able to tell when context helps determine the value of the answer, and how to measure the value of the content that our Texperts provide. On the web, of course, tracing the chain of cash flow, and assigning value to content, becomes a much trickier proposition.

As search-based advertising creeps into the mobile sector, the way in which content is valued will become far more complicated. New services like Blyk (who SMS Text News recently profiled- look for some familar faces at Blyk’s launch) and JumpTap’s mobile advertising solution on the Spanish Telefónica emoción Portal (with contextual banner ads and sponsored search links) are cropping up all the time.

Marketing techniques for local & mobile search are clearly on the rise, as evidenced by its own forthcoming conference in the US (which we recently blogged about). The question on everyone’s mind is, will mobile search marketing content help us find what we’re looking for? Or will the mobile space get more cluttered?

Let us know what you think.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 by Thomas Roberts and is filed under Buzz, Community. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.