[aabajian]

If you're looking for a company to blame for the endless Google results of "top-10 ways of doing X" or "the best new vacuum cleaners review", look no further than HubSpot. Their business model was based on helping small business gain traction by writing a a lot of verbose blog posts. So now when you're looking how to fix a leaking faucet, you first have to read about the history of faucets.

[raincole]

It's not that I don't believe you, but the "top-10 X" format is so easy to replicate that I highly suspect that it was pushed by one single company.

[truetraveller]

Proof / refs?

[aabajian]

Their founders (Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah) are credited with defining "inbound marketing."

Here is the original version of their book: https://www.amazon.com/Inbound-Marketing-Found-Google-Social...

[constantinum]

In a way only marketeers think hubspot does very good product marketing. (i’m a user of hubspot for 8 years or so)

[bschne]

Not proof, per se, but the term to look up is "inbound marketing".

HubSpot was very big on pushing companies to publish lots of content like blog posts and then having calls to action for people to submit their info in exchange for a whitepaper download or similar. Predictably if your main goal is to consistently publish blog posts and whitepapers to generate leads, and you don't have a strong culture of quality and good writing, it's going to lead to lots of slop (even before you could automate writing it with AI).

That being said, I'm not sure how much to blame HubSpot vs. this just generally having been a marketing approach/idea that was "in the air" while it sort of worked (for some definition of "worked"). I sort of remember a handful of companies at the time doing pretty good blog/content marketing by writing useful and thoughtful stuff, and then lots of companies going „got it, make blog and profit!“. But possible that the HubSpot push accelerated that a lot — I don‘t feel like I have a good intuition about that part.

See e.g. https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing

[FormalShorts]

Inbound marketing is pretty explicitly about creating high quality content that builds a business's credibility, making prospects more likely to want to engage and buy from said business. Creating slop 'top 10' lists is kind of the opposite, pushing customers away. It's a bit of a stretch, therefore to blame HubSpot for garbage content on the internet - since doing this is the opposite of what they advocated. Grifters are always going to be around looking to make a quick buck with the least amount of effort possible.

[bschne]

> Inbound marketing is pretty explicitly about creating high quality content that builds a business's credibility, making prospects more likely to want to engage and buy from said business

Well, yeah, I agree and would probably pursue it like this if I was running a business. However I get the impression that is not what happened at many places that adopted the approach, including one I've previously worked for.