In a previous post we had talked about trash content sites and how they publish cheap or syndicated content simply to attract search engine traffic and make money from PPC ads.
In that post we anticipated that Google, Yahoo! and others would eventually find ways to identify these sites and drop them way down in the search listings.
But perhaps we spoke too soon, and have seen just the beginning of the trash content site explosion.
In addition to trash content sites, there are also “lucky domain name” sites.
FlashGames.com is an example of these.
Its only “content” is a list of links to other game sites. But because the domain name is one that inexperienced web users type directly into the address bar of their browsers — in the hope that there is a site with that name — it earns revenue of more than $150,000 a year selling online ads.
The practice of finding domain names that people will type directly into the address bars of browsers is already a huge business. And it’s about to get bigger.
Richard Rosenblatt, former chairman of MySpace.com, has raised $120 million from investors to build a new company, Demand Media Inc. Its purpose? To invest in these lucky domain name sites.
And according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, he is going to go one step further. He is going to add “cheap content” to these sites, along with the ads.
So there you have it. We are about to be faced with a $120 million investment in cheap content.
The number of trash content sites will continue to grow, not decline.
And as these lucky domain name sites already generate about 5% to 10% of search-engine revenues, perhaps Google, Yahoo! and the others will be tempted not to penalize them too heavily.
As for the rest of us. We’ll have to do the only thing that can beat these sites in the long term – create great content that our visitors will want to talk about and come back to.
