The pageview journalism model is fascinating. Initially you just had to produce cheap content in volume. Now you actually have to build the incentive structure so that most of your content is free. The payouts to writers become somewhat of a skill based lottery.
Much like Bitcoin mining, there are only so many pageviews per day. You can optimize certain behaviors to increase your pageviews and ad impressions -- more ad units, auto reloading pages, slideshows, more side links, etc. Publishers doing this increase their slice of the pie. Big brand advertisers appear to not track sales at all so quality publishers basically subsidize the low quality content farms.
Fighting back is possible. If you see a weird article that friends are sharing, look up the writer. Many of these people are amateur writers or college students. Facts are wrong (happens in real journalism too.) Some of the 'controversies' in technology today are almost completely made up but they attract pageviews, so they keep getting written about.
One thing I learned when I was earlier was that a lot of articles in the professional business press where complete trash for an entrepreneur -- Fortune, Forbes, Harvard Business Review. They had some basis in fact but consisted of a lot of noise written by writers who probably didn't know what they were writing about (with exceptions, which is why I kept reading.) What happens when the people who do read get not only noise but noise that no one fact checked? Twitter, Youtube, and fact based organizations (Human Rights Watch, ACLU) publishing material to all instantly balance even this ocean of crap out. I think despite the negatives we remain much better informed than the past.
Much like Bitcoin mining, there are only so many pageviews per day. You can optimize certain behaviors to increase your pageviews and ad impressions -- more ad units, auto reloading pages, slideshows, more side links, etc. Publishers doing this increase their slice of the pie. Big brand advertisers appear to not track sales at all so quality publishers basically subsidize the low quality content farms.
Fighting back is possible. If you see a weird article that friends are sharing, look up the writer. Many of these people are amateur writers or college students. Facts are wrong (happens in real journalism too.) Some of the 'controversies' in technology today are almost completely made up but they attract pageviews, so they keep getting written about.
One thing I learned when I was earlier was that a lot of articles in the professional business press where complete trash for an entrepreneur -- Fortune, Forbes, Harvard Business Review. They had some basis in fact but consisted of a lot of noise written by writers who probably didn't know what they were writing about (with exceptions, which is why I kept reading.) What happens when the people who do read get not only noise but noise that no one fact checked? Twitter, Youtube, and fact based organizations (Human Rights Watch, ACLU) publishing material to all instantly balance even this ocean of crap out. I think despite the negatives we remain much better informed than the past.