Why Sites With Junk Content Sell More Than Average
Cheap labor on the Internet.
A lot of people are clogging up websites and blogs with posts automatically generated by artificial intelligence and attracting ads from big brands placed by online advertising companies without those same brands knowing. This comes from a recent study shared by MIT Technology Review.
Many famous brands pay for advertising, which ends up being published on useless websites and blogs without their knowledge.
Even Google ads appear on these useless sites and blogs, even though Google forbids advertising on sites with “automatically generated content.”
The fame of AI is simply accelerating the beginning of an Internet era full of useless content and spam. Not to mention the waste of billions of dollars on useless websites.
Because most brands and companies that advertise on the Internet today focus more on tools with an “algorithmic ad buying” system.
It works like this.
Advertising sites like Taboola, Google ads, and Outbrain for example have algorithms that place ads on different websites, blogs and portals using complex calculations that optimize those same ads for the number of users an ad is likely to attract from a company’s target audience. As a result, big brands/corporations pay to place their ads on sites, blogs and portals they may never have heard of.
Sometimes advertising sites don’t manually monitor each ad on each site.
Taking advantage of the AI situation, many astute people have started to create text, image, and video farms, producing unlimited low-quality content to attract money through advertising.
These types of sites, or content farms—as they are nicknamed—use clickbait headlines, autoplay videos, and pop-up ads to extract as much money as possible from internet advertising companies.
According to a recent study by the ANA, the Association of National Advertisers, it is estimated that more than 13 billion dollars are wasted on these useless sites every year.
Today, generative AI makes it possible to automate content fulfillment and generate more and more websites and blogs in a matter of seconds without any effort. Anyone without web programming skills can do this.
NewsGuard calls them “questionable AI-generated websites.” One such site intercepted by Internet detectives generated more than 1,000 headlines a day.
Some of these sites are more sophisticated and convincing. They even generate photos and biographies of the authors of the posts using generative AI.
Easy $$$
These sites and blogs with AI-generated content make a living from buying programmatic ads. Even ads from Fortune 500 companies appear on these useless sites.
In January 2023, the average cost of this type of ad was $1.21 per thousand impressions. That’s even envy-inducing for real bloggers like me. However, companies and brands often don’t even track an ad distributed by advertising companies like Taboola and Google Ads, even if it costs them money.
The Google Ads algorithm is the largest internet advertising farm in the world. Google made $168 billion in sales in 2022 alone.
In the past, Facebook and Google have been criticized for advertising on dubious websites. Google even has strict policies against such sites.
According to NewsGuard, a quarter of the sites flagged as dubious contained ads placed by the major brands’ algorithms. Of the 393 ads from major companies identified, 356 were on Google.
Google, for example, already has policies against running ads on content farms. However, Google claims that the presence of AI-generated content on a page is not a legitimate violation.
Sometimes quantity is bad
Most sites generated by generative artificial intelligence post low-quality content, but they don’t spread misinformation.
However, as content farms are more lucrative than ever, many are creating robot sites, which are often full of junk news and misinformation.
As anyone can create content in less than a minute with AI, there is the threat of accelerating the spread of false information.
MedicalOutline.com, for example, is a fake site.
Its headlines featured content containing misinformation harmful to health.
Headlines such as “Can lemon cure skin allergies?”, and “How to prevent cancer naturally? elicit unusual behavior from readers.
According to NewsGuard, the site featured ads from leading brands, including Citigroup Bank and health company GNC. Their ads were placed through Google.
To wrap it all up,
Even though these sites still need to attract readers to their content to make money online, and it is unclear whether generative AI will make this task easier for the owners of these sites, programmatic advertising as we know it will no longer be the same. AI changes everything.
Just one piece of legislation on Internet advertising services and consumers will see a very different Internet: more irrelevant ads, lower quality content and services, and more paid subscriptions (Twitter/X and Facebook have already started). The European Union was quick to create these Internet laws.
At the time of this writing, there have been no solutions to this problem that scares many people, especially since advertising drives the entire Internet economy.
This is because programmatic advertising, especially targeted advertising (based on what the user has searched for or clicked on), is the central basis of the entire Internet economy.