[10ren]

Just BTW: Regarding the time to prepare the article itself, it's standard practice for companies to send press releases to magazines/articles that are already ready for publication as is. It makes sense: they will benefit massively from the publicity, and they have the best access to the material. Who knows, in this case they may even have included the "too slick" passage for verisimilitude (with an ironic wink). Most probably, wired did extra work, and just used the press release as a base. I'm just saying that that base reduces the work they had to do.

In the long term, quality will improve, in tiny marginal steps. The company already talks about that extra $1 for fact checking; but if another company is doing the same thing, and starts ranking higher, there will be pressure to increase quality. (That is, assuming the ad-clicks are worth fighting for...)

It occurs to me that Google's pagerank is out of date: today, few people will add a link to their webpage/blog to one of these $20 videos, so pagerank can't rank them using links. (this isn't a danger to google; and their algorithm already uses many factors other than links). It would be a valuable to rank them somehow, using the behaviour of users. How to do that?

[chuck_taylor]

Most likely Wired didn't do anything based on a press release. The P.R. industry would like you to believe they are able to drive the news agenda, but when it comes to the Wireds and The New York Timeses of the world, it's rare for a press release to lead to a story of this magnitude.

Most likely, Demand Studios' P.R. people freaked out when Wired inquired.

This story likely took weeks to report and write. A graphic artist probably spent at least a week preparing the chart. Good journalism takes a lot of effort, and so few people realize that.

As someone who has been paid to write and edit news for 30 years, this article was pretty depressing, but I already knew about Demand Studios. And you know what? It looks like they take good care of their writers, at least in the karma department. These seem to be folks who have always wanted to be paid to write but never had the opportunity to get paid for it, enjoy surfing the Web, and can bang out three or four of these articles in a day and have some good walking-around-money.

They seem to be mostly American, but at some point I'm sure the Third World will be recruited to drive the price down even further. Seen what they are paying on Mechanical Turk?

[10ren]

I wonder if we'll ever know, factually, who wrote to whom first?

I don't mean to slight wired; but I'm sure that many technology companies would like to be covered by wired, and if they have any sense, they'd prepare an article in the most convenient form for wired, and send it to them - and the guy running Demand definitely knows how to make things happen at this point. They wouldn't have any control over what Wired did with it, of course.

I wouldn't worry about it too much - it's just a drop in the ocean, and there are lots of other sources of information on the web. Probably, it's fair to say that having a crappy $20 video is quite a bit better than nothing. And if there's a few results to a google search, most people will look at more than one.

Example: I had a blocked toilet yesterday, google came up with a several excellent hits on it. I tried the suggestions in order, and problem solved. The internet is pretty cool.

I guess the depressing part is that higher quality can't be supported by adwords alone - it would seem, anyway. I think quality is often best rewarded in niches audiences and uses, where quality really matters.

[chuck_taylor]

I think you mean AdSense. AdWords are a way for content creators to <i>spend</i> money, not make it.

In any event, AdSense revenue is trivial compared to the cost of creating content that has any widespread impact.

[petercooper]

It would be a valuable to rank them somehow, using the behaviour of users. How to do that?

I'd be surprised if Google wasn't using Analytics to do that for many of the sites that use it.