We’re content starved. The emergence of tablets and mobile devices has only enhanced our desire to consume digital content. There’s a problem though. When content producers cannot meet the demands of a ravenous public, things can get ugly and the public walks-digitally speaking.
Actually, things already are ugly. Specifically, the dearth of original compelling content in the digital space has caused us to consume subpar content wrapped around good SEO. Don’t you just hate when you click on a compelling search result only to be met with 100 words of link laden dreck? That’s been the case for quite some time now, and only recently has it become clearly evident that what seems to work for most producers of content when they don’t have anything to “share” with others, is to just steal, plagiarize or reproduce someone else’s stuff; and wrap that around good SEO.
Good content is getting lost in the firehose of bad content
But there is a simple reason why they (marketers in general) have this burning desire to push out as much digital content as they can-whether it’s theirs or not. There’s an ulterior motive happening here. These folks are trying to appease the almighty search engines. Specifically Google, but Bing and Yahoo and all the other 2nd tier engines figure in as well. Organic search in a nutshell.
Most producers of content are in the business of driving traffic. Traffic equates to advertising which equates to dollars. You can buy traffic, but short of spending in the 6 figures to create artificial traffic, the only real way you’re going to get organic visits to your sites is to write content and share content that has all of the “right” SEO properties so as to come up high in search. Screw the readers. Forget good content, the goal now is “searchable”, SEO friendly content.
Content producers are unknowingly deferring to search engines instead of people
Does this mean that there are still sites out there pushing fresh, relevant, content that is meant for people to consume, view and share? Perhaps, but it’s a short list. You can look to CNN, USAToday, The New York Times, Techcrunch, Mashable, and MSNBC for examples of purveyors of quality content except that they can be just as guilty of the keyword laden salacious topic and title that is sure to drive readers, shares, comments and traffic.
As the tablet and smart phone markets continue to expand, so will the amount of water downed re-used content. Thus, we need to get back to a time when content mattered, when good content mattered. I’m not so sure we can as long as we’re still trying to figure out who we’re supposed to be creating content for. Is it people or search engines?
Direct Marketing Observations 
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I think two issues that are part of this equation are time and resources. Good content doesn’t happen overnight. It requires planning and execution. And, if you don’t have the time to create good content – and can’t afford to hire someone to do it – you often end up with meh or totally bleh content or none at all.
Great thoughts. I think the search engines are looking and striving for better content, the clogged pipeline is a game of volume. Those same search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated to try and rid their pages of poor content and SEO only shenanigans. I encourage companies to avoid diluting their brands and start utilizing content as a way to generate leads and maintain their customer base. Thanks for writing.