I regularly write for trade journals in the legal field and cannot conceive churning out worthwhile articles in less than a day, much less hours. Is it all clickbait junk? How many of the articles here on HN come from such mills?
Then, about the same time that started to fade Facebook unleashed a traffic boom from the news feed. Newspapers, blogs, and content sites have benefited immensely from this. In this case it is not so much "clickbait junk" be re-written articles stolen from someone else. Take a look at a news site like the DailyMail, that is what is going on more or less. DailyMail is an interesting example because the content is produced so quickly that it is common for basic mistakes like the people in the photos being mislabeled or a male being referred to as a female and so on. Imagine how accurate the alleged facts are in that type of content!
I suspect the era emerging now is going to become a lot more difficult for both writers and content publishers. Not just because of the eventuality of internet ad revenue growing with the rate of inflation but also the big platforms (Facebook, Google) continuing to plug their leaky boats (which leaked for a very good reason.)
Most of the articles I've been paid decent money to produce are now locked behind paywalls, which I ironically cannot afford. Hopefully that means they aren't fluff.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=githubengineering.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com
etc
Anecdotal experience makes me think this is a problem on any submission-driven site.
See this example:
main website is
Their blog: http://blog.livinginchico.com
This is unnecessary requirement enforced by Google on all these small shops. By keeping their Blog active they will maintain their ranking in Google.
Now see this blog post http://blog.livinginchico.com/blog/have-a-stress-free-thanks...
Now you will notice one thing, there are couple of outgoing links in the content:
"other dishes" going out to http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/recipe-collections-fa...
"Check this one out here!" going out to http://www.cozi.com/live-simply/complete-plan-thanksgiving-d...
These are called backlink. This way realsimple.com and cozi.com will keep their raking up in the Google ranking.
So these days when you search in Google you click around from one content-mill fluff to another content-mill fluff. Google has been hijacked by these content-mills.
I am frustrated by this crap.
So after these so called content writers are done with this useless fluff. Someone in Demand Media will insert realsimple and cozi links into the article and post it on main website. The main purpose of this is to bring Cozi and Realsimple raking up in Google.
Search for "Make-Ahead Thanksgiving Recipes" in Google and enjoy the results. https://www.google.com/search?q=Make-Ahead+Thanksgiving+Reci...