If you have ever wondered how the mainstream media works, watching Manufacturing Consent does a great job of displaying its sordid underbelly. The bias is not always this obvious, but it is always there:

The most recent issue of Harper's has an article by Eric Janszen about financial bubbles throughout US history named The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash. A couple key quotes:

We have learned that the industry in any given bubble must support hundreds or thousands of separate firms financed by not billions but trillions of dollars in new securities that Wall Street will create and sell. Like housing in the late 1990s, this sector of the economy must already be formed and growing even as the previous bubble deflates. For those investing in that sector, legislation guaranteeing favorable tax treatment, along with other protections and advantages for investors, should already be in place or under review. Finally, the industry must be popular, its name on the libs of government policymakers and journalists. It should be familiar to those who watch television news or read newspapers.

The media rides the story up and rides it back down. We always need something to talk about. It happens to the media offline just like it does to niche publishers online. But the memory and analysis are short and shallow, quickly pointing a finger at a false cause, fixing symptoms like antidepressant drugs do:

The U.S. mortgage crisis has been labeled a "subprime mortgage crisis," but subprime mortgages were only a sideshow that appeared late, as the housing-bubble credit machine ran out of creditworthy borrowers. The main event was the hyperinflation of home prices. Risks are embedded in the price and lurk as defaults. Even after the faith that supported a bubble recedes, false beliefs continue to obscure cause and effect as the crisis unfolds.

It puts the formation of the alternative energy market in a fascinating perspective, especially as I finished reading about the demise of ACA and hung up the phone from an automated call from a sleazy telemarketer company calling me at 8pm, stating their partnerships with non-profits to help consolidate the debt that I don't have due to the country's current credit crisis.

When economic fraying appears at the weak edges of the market it hints that more is to come. Long time bulls are turning bearish and the stock markets are hurting worldwide. And so history repeats itself for the people, yes.

Since Google largely tends to favor ranking informational websites over commercial websites, some authoritative blogs tend to rank for valuable queries based on posts they make in passing.

Even if you had no intent to monetize a post, it just became easier to monetize accidental rankings. If you use analytics to track your stats and notice that you start ranking for some good keywords you can use Triggit to embed links to merchant products directly in the text of your blog post.

Shoemoney created this quick video to show how Triggit works

Unlike the automated ad solutions like intellitxt or AdSense, these Triggit ads

• look like other regular links on the page (so they should get a high CTR)
• can easily be applied on a page by page level (so you do not have to clutter up every page to monetize the few pages that can make a lot of money)
• link to products recommended by the editor (to preserve editorial integrity)
• can link to merchants that pay via affiliate payout or CPC (offering multiple monetization models)
• allow you to keep your pages clean (and easy to link at) until they rank, then have you add monetization after you have a leading market position for related keywords

Triggit ads are easy to set up and should require little maintenance on the end user's side, but they are still a small start up, so if you start doing well with them make sure you remember which pages do well so you can keep monetizing the pages if the Triggit partnership stops working, and so you can track which pages you should try to monetize more aggressively and/or build links to.

As blended semi-editorial in content ad networks like these evolve, the distinction between optimization and spam blurs. And since Google has a similar product, it is going to be hard to view this in a negative light without looking hypocritical in the process. From Google's pay per action page:

Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher's page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher's recommendatory text: "Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today." (Mousing over the link will display "Ads by Google" to identify these as pay-per-action ads).

Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we've found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

After much hype Wikia Search just launched with a dummy index. No surprise the launch was received badly. Worse yet, none of the alleged human relevancy tools are available. Wasted opportunity. Google has at least another year of having no real competition.

If you have not yet heard of Drupal, it is the open source CMS that powers this site (and many sites far more robust and popular than this one). I think I am pretty good at predicting web trends, and 2 or 3 years from now Drupal will be about as popular and well known as Wordpress and Wikipedia are today.

Drupal is more powerful than what the average blogger needs to run their site, but it has so many features and options that it can allow you to bolt many things onto your blog that you would not be able to do very easily with something like Wordpress or MovableType.

Pay Per Post Already Dominates Many Business Models

Search engines toe the company line fighting against spam, but are paid posts any worse than sponsored research? The day before Matt posted about some lowbrow PPP ads used to equate paid post with bogus information on brain tumors, I posted about how some scientific research is polluted by commercial interests, and an SEO Book contributor by the nickname of RFK left this great comment:

I was just going to comment on this issue on Matt's blog, since he went on a rant about paid posts being bad for personal brain surgery research. Really.

The irony is that most/all of the articles that he would prefer to see on the Google SERPS are researched, assembled and ghost written by pharma companies. Having worked with a number of clients in the medical field it's become more and more apparent that the "studies" published by well-known academics are most often based on research by the drug companies, scripted by a hired copywriter and given to the academic to sign off and publish under their byline.

This begs the question: what's more harmful, the illiterate drivel of a $10 Pay Per Poster or a biased supposed medical study published by a respected researcher? Obviously Google can't control what papers are published, but they shouldn't be pretending that restricting competing paid advertising practises is about returning better content.

The Copy & Paste Culture

As a joke, years ago I created a rather offensive seedy website (with low quality information on porn, drugs, and gambling), and a professor diametrically opposed to my worldviews sourced that site as a credible source. If he was that intellectually lazy with his own professor profile page, how much intellectual laziness goes into the average web page?

As media empires crumble the recycling effect of online information is only going to get worse. While I may not agree with all of the research, the Report on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines, particularly Google highlighted how journalists start research using Google, and even have a way to warp Google for other writers:

More and more, initiatives to maintain journalistic quality standards complain that also journalistic stories are increasingly the result of a mere "googlisation of reality". One drastic example is described by the German journalist Jochen Wegner [Wegner 2005]: A colleague of him did a longer report on a small village in the north of Germany. He reported about a good restaurant with traditional cooking, a region-typical choir doing a rehearsal in the village church and about a friendly farmer selling fresh agricultural products. If you type the name of the small village into Google, the first three hits are the web sites of the restaurant, the farmer and the choir. And if you compare the complete story of the journalist with the texts on the web sites found by Google, you will see: As a journalist of the 21st century, you don't have to be at a place to write a "personal" story about it. Google can do this for you.

When you think of that publishing trend, think of how well Wikipedia ranks, and how Wikipedia often reflects the public relations campaign of the largest market participant it gets a bit concerning. It gets even uglier if you think about the erosion of publishing based business models, and their increasing reliance on public relations firms to give them stories as they drastically cut staffing levels.

The Race Toward The Edges of Reality

The types of publishing that will dominate the web are

• those selling content as service: the value add of service will allow them to develop relationships with readers which help them market their content while still being able to provide honest value and compete in competitive marketplaces
• those giving away content to push commercial services: if you can gain enough attention, respect, and credibility you can charge well for your work. You can even sell what others give away, see the above category.
• those creating content from passion: they don't need to be profitable if they are doing it for fun or because they are passionate
• those with extreme bias: a biased article is remarkable and more citation-worthy than a vanilla article
• public relations spin: essentially Pay Per Post, also without disclosure
• those creating thin content: consumer generated content, repackaged ideas as link list linkbaits, and/or copy and paste of one of the above groups
• profitable advertisements: with automated integration or editorial selection causing these to have exposure in the above content types even if they are not well ranked in the organic parts of the web. The ease of tracking these ad results will effectively warp many of the above categories of information.

Biased content is easier to reference, syndicate, and subscribe to than more balanced content because we are more aligned to communications messages that match our worldview. And much of the passion driven content is tied to a strong bias (like hate sites). Which means that search engines can try to display a diverse set of search results, but as time passes they will reflect more biased groups of opinions and far fewer balanced articles.

Your Feedback Needed

Maybe it has always been this way though? Do any reporters read this blog? I would love your comments on concepts similar to result diversity in offline publishing, especially contrasting it before and after the web.

I wonder if my roll as an SEO makes me interested in such issues? Do other SEOs (perhaps you) find macroeconomic and publishing trends interesting? What other topics do you find yourself losing hours to every week?