Crap Sells
Most online writing sucks. It is boring or badly written, (or both) it is smothered with advertisements, and contains clumsy phrases. This is the popular, revenue grabbing writing. The kind which permits one to earn a living.
Unlike Real Life where one has to be a great writer telling an engrossing story, in Cyberspace, advertisers determine quality. Advertisers and Search Engines.
Unlike Real Life where one has to be a great writer telling an engrossing story, in Cyberspace, advertisers determine quality. Advertisers and Search Engines.
Ad Copy
Above the title is an Ad. This Ad is paid for by Adsense (Google). The more viewers who come to this page, the more money Adsense pays to the writer. It seems, on the face of it, something like the 'Super Bowl'. The bigger the audience the more the Ads cost.
On the Face of it...but not on the facts of it
On the Face of it...but not on the facts of it
S.E.O. Keywords and other Magnets
Anyone who looks up Search Engine Optimization will come across various phrases which catch Google or Yahoo or Bing or any of the other Search Engines. By copying these phrases and inserting them one a paragraph, one will complete an article designed not to dispense information, not to amuse or educate, but to get hits. Hits are important, quality is not.
Articles of 700 words, 500 being SEO along with 'Keywords' get the attention of the Search Engine, direct the traffic, and there are thousands of users, washing up on the shores of Guano Island, viewing an item, which has absolutely no value whatsoever, save to spin money for the character who, pardon the expression, 'wrote' it
Those who write good prose, who have something to say, will starve to death if they depend on the pennies they get via hits. For quality doesn't sell. Quality is too unique to have SEO or Keywords.
Can Robots write?
Aha. Now you get it.
With software applications doing the 'grading'; is it a shock that humans imitating these applications, would score higher than the unborged human expressing his/her originality?
In Early days of Sci Fi one imagined Robots becoming almost human, i.e. an Android like Data on Star Trek. Of course that is fiction. Science Fact is that humans have become more robotic. |
Just as a dog learns certain behaviours to please his master, humans have learned how to please software applications. Unlike hardcopy where one can create whatever pattern or style, in Cyberspace one is limited to the variables in the program. The human learns to fit into the application. The human learns how the application processes information. The human now composes prose according to the reference points of the application.
The application responds to 'You need to know' the application responds to "All over the World" so the human writes between these SEO phrases. What is written is not important save and except it contains 'Keywords'. These are words that will catch the Search Engine as well as the Advertisements.
Writing an article about products being hawked on Ebay will get hundreds of thousands of hits and clicks. This is because advertisers of similar products will match to the Keywords in the prose. Linking the article to Ebay will get runover hits from persons who Google Ebay. Using the SEO terms will push the article up in the rankings because where someone has Googled Cheap Nikes and a million sites have popped up, ranking them depends on how many of the Keywords and the SEO terms are used.
There's the fool, labouring over the prose. Going for the witty and incredibly brilliant turn of phrase. Discarding the trite, having bursts of inspiration. Writing something that in another time, another medium would be prized.
But the fool is writing online. The fool is doomed to oblivion, because the fool doesn't know that quality does not sell. |
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Here is the Crap Writer. He's got a template chock full of the SEO phrases and key words. The article says absolutely nothing. It is linked to every other article he has ever written. It has just gotten 200k hits within one hour of being published. This is because he is NOT a writer. His thoughts don't run to prose. His thoughts run to $. He can sell life-insurance or junk bonds, rat poison or Viagra. He has learned how to conform to SEO. |