Is Google’s SEO euphoria killing premium writing on the net?

Now that Arianna Huffington has halted her entrepreneurial journey and starts carrying an AOL business card in her hand bag instead, there is a larger question that dogs the internet. Is this the final straw that will break the content creator’s back? For the diehard online journalist, who has long dreaded the commoditization of content on the internet, there seem to be troubled times ahead. The $315- million marriage of Huffington Post and AOL is just the latest alarm bell that went off. And for the country with the world’s highest English-speaking population, India, the portents are not too good as well.
India hasn’t had its own Huffington Post so far. Hence, any debate over its valuation, ethics of unpaid content or the ideological shifts of its charismatic ex-owner, cannot possibly have a direct Indian connection. Online news in India largely gets defined as print or television news reproduced on the media group’s respective websites, whose staffing, content sourcing or even advertising revenues seldom threaten their existence. Originality would be limited to blogs and a certain percentage of the low intensity breaking news flow, which mainstream media doesn’t bother to focus on. But there is a larger fallout, which this deal has underlined. The commoditization of online content now has yet another powerful alibi for publishers and advertisers alike, but not good news for the career writer – journalist or otherwise.
A dot com boom, a bust and a resurrection later, the internet may well have become a dream nursery for an entrepreneur to grow his dream venture, but the very tools of measurability that have made the internet a money spinner and a viable advertising medium for many, are gradually proving to be the nemesis for good writing. Technology may be constantly refining a unidirectional climb towards precision-targeting and contextual relevance, but it is simultaneously corroding its ability to differentiate between chalk and cheese – between premium writing and run-of-the mill or mediocre content.
On the internet, one word fits all. Content. From articles written by the brightest erudite brains to a proverbial essay on the cow by a barely literate rookie – it’s all content. The worth of the written word is no longer relative to or dependant on either its author or its publisher. For Google’s search engine algorithms, a word is a word after all – nothing more, nothing less. And now that Google controls an overwhelmingly large portion of the internet’s revenue machine, publishers are only too glad to play to the search engines, than to its readers. In trendy parlance, it is called search engine optimization.
Catering to readers gets us adulation that’s not monetisable. Catering to Google gets us revenue, says a prototype publisher. And how does a journalist get paid, if there are no revenues? True. And false. True, because that’s the formula on which the media industry operates. And false, because the internet has fallen prey to its own strength of measurability, when it comes to commanding disproportionately high advertising tariffs, the way print and television get away with.
So, no matter how smug a celebrity iconic journalist or columnist may feel while writing an in-depth, well-researched article on a subject topping the current affairs charts, a greenhorn with a barely tolerable knowledge of the English language could well garner better revenues by blatantly rehashing and aggregating content from multiple published articles on the same subject the next morning. And one of the sources could well be the journalist’s own article. Copyright violation, did you say? Not quite. Sentences can be rejigged, clauses transposed and synonyms brought in to make the “content” read different. And finally, there are online plagiarisation-detecting software tools like Copyscape that can certify “uniqueness” of any content with a single click. That’s all one needs to achieve in order to qualify for Google’s Adsense dollars.
Journalism, much like soulful music and aesthetic photography, has always been an art – of lyrical expression and great story-telling. The advent of 24x7 satellite television may have usurped the task of breaking news, but the beauty of the written word still commands colossal respect, which has quintessentially epitomised journalism as a profession. Writers and journalists who have recall value, are precious because readers love to read what they write and the way they write. Greater the recall and respect, the greater their market value,and the salaries they earn. A Walter Lippmann did not need to count his pageviews or his Google Adsense eCPM to win two Pulitzers or his legendary fan following.
Perceptions, one would say. Unscientific too, perhaps! Not measurable beyond a certain degree of extrapolation. But that’s how newspapers and magazines have flourished through the ages. That’s how journalists have become icons and celebrities. That’s also how the advertiser has been evaluating publications and apportioning media spends. None of this was strictly measurable, and yet excellence was rewarded.
Google’s technology prowess has brought about a major paradigm shift – it has made the formula of earning money a bit too simplistic and rendered excellence dispensable. One doesn’t need to be a mega media conglomerate today to get into the online content business. An entire industry has mushroomed out of even nondescript towns, which takes advantage of this blatant commoditization. Garage operations, which once spawned technology startups, now recruit youngsters with a woefully limited hold over the English language as content writers, with paltry salaries, at times even on a pay-per-story basis. Topics don’t owe anything to topicality. Whatever is hot on Google, becomes a hot topic to write on.
The volumes of content produced are published on the internet and optimised according to Google’s search recommendations, so that it could get more visitors to come and click on the ads on their pages – better known as search engine optimization (SEO) to the initiated. And then the cash register starts ringing. It is an easy formula to earn revenues by simply amassing sheer volumes of content, its abysmal quality notwithstanding, and then just waving the SEO wand. And voila, you are in business.
Whether content writers are hired for a salary or paid one dollar for every 500 words, the mushrooming market for SEO content would put even a wastepaper (in India, it is called raddi) business to shame. For a country that has millions of English-speaking youngsters in search of jobs that don’t expect either great degrees or shades of excellence, being mediocre or intellectually challenged is no longer a spoiler on the internet.
The demise of the internet as a journalist’s playground going unmourned is understandable though. What the writer has lost, the advertiser has gained. So has the micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) sector, which forms the bedrock of Google’s India revenues.
At the height of the global financial meltdown, the Indian MSME sector has learnt its most valuable lesson – the benefits and viability of online marketing. As the publisher and the advertiser celebrate their resonance, a comparatively miniscule community of established and aspiring writers, endowed with excellence, displays a mounting sense of dismissive nonchalance about the online medium being a credible career prospect.
Even now, when social media has begun to alter lifestyles and media planners are beginning to loosen up and consider apportioning a noticeable slice of client budgets to online advertising, the aspiring journalist in India thinks online for just his social networking and blogs at best, but unequivocally opts for print or television when it comes to either his business card or salary. And that leaves the rest – who may not be good enough on a journalistic yardstick, but effortlessly pass muster for the countless SEO companies, which gives them their salary.
Paid content on the internet is one experiment that has bombed repeatedly. If readers have repeatedly refused to pay up for the content they consume online, advertisers have been roped in with technological impunity to make the medium viable for content. Fair game. But that’s where my eulogy stops. Excellence on the internet will be sorely missed. (Copyrights: Global India Newswire)

(Saurav Sen is a senior digital media professional and consultant based in New Delhi. He has been the Head of Digital Media, Khaleej Times, Dubai, Editor of The Times of India Online and Group Business Head (Internet & Telecom VAS), ABP Group in the past.)
Source http://www.ibtimes.com/