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In an interview in Salon, Richard Rosenblatt, founder and chief of Demand Media, defends the company’s content creation approach.

“People want the information and we are providing it,” he said, dismissing charges that Demand-owned sites like EHow are flooding the internet with poorly-produced, unwanted content. This factory approach has been blasted by luminaries such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb (and even little guys like yours truly) as being content farms, leading to the mass production of the lowest common denominator.

This is the same model that has doomed the major label music industry. Demand Media uses search data to drive the content they produce, determining the value of that content by the dollar value of the clicks it will generate. This is much the same model as the music industry has used for decades, deciding what albums will be released and what they will sound like based on what has sold in the past because they “know what kids want.”

I call it The Nickelback Approach to content production.

Regardless of the time and money spent producing content, is your company content to let a third party be the voice of your brand? A third party who has no interest in your reputation, the quality of your products and services, and who leeches visitors and customers from your site to theirs? A third party who will take ownership of content about you and then happily sell you advertising on relevant pages on their sites?

I didn’t think so.

Don’t let content farms like Demand Media sell your own products back to you. Take charge of your online reputation and the money you spend on search engine optimization. Your hard-earned marketing budget should enable your company to take the lead in getting your message out there.

Sure, it will cost you. But wouldn’t you rather get the credit and the conversions that come from being the experts in your field, rather than letting an outsider fence that expertise for their own profit?

Get in the game. Tend your own garden. Get in touch. We’ll help you.

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• Jay Rosen Interviews Demand Media: Are Content Farms “Demonic”? (readwriteweb.com)
• Ad-Driven Content – Is it Crossing The Line? (readwriteweb.com)
• Demand Media May Be Bad for Social Media, but Not for Journalism (poynter.org)

Today's special: the new content model

McDonaldization. Starbucksification. WalMartasticizing.

Whatever you want to call it, the mass production of homogenous web content with the single aim of moving units/conversions is the hot-button issue of today.

As enumerated in many blog posts, the gaming of search with cookie-cutter content with little real meaning or utility in order to drive links to commercial sites is on the rise. Despite its “black hat” status, it’s nonetheless been demonstrated to be an effective–if nefarious–SEO technique.

Searchers are inundated with SRPs super-sized with blog posts and aggregators, often with content mined from other sources rather than hand-rolled, whose sole purpose is to deliver eyeballs to other sources.

Respected blogger Michael Arrington recently posted “The End of Hand Crafted Content” on his TechCrunch blog, in which he exposes his fear that cheap, disposable content will bring about the content apocalypse.

Companies like Demand Media push out reams of video and text content every day for prices lower than any sane, rational person would take to actually write content. All this content is purpose-built to deliver search results.

That retailers are lining up to pay for the lowest common denominator is no surprise–you don’t make money writing checks.

Even less shocking is that the perpetrators are often old media and marketing schlubs who only know one way of doing business: craft a message, excrete it out all over the unsuspecting populace, and hope they’ll pay for it. It’s less like blogging than Blobbing.

The screams are almost as loud as those heard around Manhattan when WalMart tried to build a store there. But the fact is that the web is more crowded than it used to be, and the ponytailed, satin baseball jacket-bedecked vultures are moving in on our little corner of the playground. They’re desperately trying to figure out the SEO and social media thing, and even if they don’t know what it means they know there’s money to be made.

Guess what: that’s how it works. It’s the same with any business, and it always has been. One good idea spawns a thousand imitators, and if that one good idea is profitable then the howls of “Me too!” grow exponentially.

Arrington’s advice to content creators? “Figure out an even more disruptive way to win, or die.”

And he’s right: the technology will always move faster than the dinosaurs of the old guard can move despite their best efforts to keep pace. Look at usage trends for MySpace vs. Facebook: MySpace became a punch line in a grand internet joke right about the time it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Here is where I could also make the argument that social search is going to become a boon for the market. It doesn’t get more homegrown than pulling your friends’ tweets and Faceboook updates into search results.

The lumbering behemoths will always come, and we need to cope and adjust. It’s up to us to keep moving even faster, doing our jobs even better, and coming up with bigger/better/faster/more ideas. (Just ask the kids at Twitter: word is they’re profitable now.) Those plodding footsteps behind us will never recede as long as they smell dollars.