Art vs. Commerce
We've entered a Vonnegut reality. One where creativity and human invention of one kind consumes creativity and humanity of another kind. Maybe this cycle has always been there, but it seems to be blossoming now.
Take Daniel Roth's recent Wired article, "The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell," as a case in point.
Roth describes Demand Media, a company which creates all kinds of text articles and videos—4,000 individual pieces of content produced and distributed every single day. Demand's focus is in providing content which "answers" needs and questions found across the Internet. A noble task, it seems. Who wouldn't welcome content which supplies the answers you were searching for?
"Demand has learned, for instance, that [the keywords] 'best' and 'how to' bring in traffic or high clickthrough rates, while 'history of' is ad poison."
The insights Demand uncovers are scintillating. And profitable.
"At the end of the process, the company has a topic and a dollar amount — the term’s 'lifetime value,' or LTV — that Demand expects to generate from any resulting content."
It's a fantastic argument. Demand knows what the people want. It's algorithms actually save time, by ferreting those topics for which you and I want greater illumination. As Roth points out,
"It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula."
"...every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas."
Bravo. Well done, algorithm! Figuring out what people want to know—in other words, figuring out "what should we talk about?" has always been a contentious, subjective issue for marketers and publishers. To leverage brute math and uncover those stories our audiences want (but haven't yet found) might just be a godsend.
"This, Reese says, is the ultimate promise of his algorithm: 'You can take something that is thought of as a creative process and turn it into a manufacturing process.'”
Uhh, hold on a second.
"You can take something that is thought of as a creative process and turn it into a manufacturing process."
Demand produces 4,000 articles and videos every single day, on-track to publish 1 million items every month by this time next year. Humans alone can't scale for that output. Fair enough, I get that. And as Roth describes the process, it's not 100% machine-driven.
"That’s not to say there isn’t any room for humans in Demand’s process. They just aren’t worth very much. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip."
In Demand's model, humans have a role to play, but you've got to literally become a machine to play. You'd have to write approximately 2,667 articles a year at $15 a pop to earn $40,000 through Demand's process. That's seven "few hundred word" articles a day, every day.
As Daniel Pink asks in A Whole New Mind, "Can someone do it cheaper? Can a computer do it faster?" Demand's approach says "yes." The Wired article begins with an interesting observation from a filmmaker producing content for Demand:
"He points out that the focus is off: The rippling water is sharp while the kayaking instructor is slightly blurred. But the company he’s working for won’t care, he says, so why should he — especially for $20 a clip?"
Heck, I can hire Niche Writers of India, "starting at $4."
Silly humans.
