Can technology help make online content pay?

Newspaper articles are expensive to produce but usually cost nothing to read online and do not command high advertising rates, since there is almost unlimited inventory. News Corp's answer is to charge for online content. Content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content, in contrast, aim to produce content at a price so low that even meagre advertising revenue can support it. Demand Media has been called "demonic." But, argues Dan Gillmor, a professor of journalism at Arizona State University, "the firm is at least interested in what people want to know -- which is nothing to sneer at". And unlike many other services that take advantage of "user generated content", he says, Demand Media actually pays its contributors. The problem with content farms, Gillmor and others say, is that they swamp the Internet with mediocre content. To earn a decent living, freelancers have to work at a breakneck pace, which has an obvious impact on quality. Moreover, content that is designed to appear high up in the results produced by search engines could lose its audience if the search engines change their rules.