Content mill “news” by “Hazel Scott”, an author that does not exist online: 18 Countries That Don’t Want American Visitors in content mill “Passing Thru“. A genuine freelance writer is not invisible online – they need to market themselves constantly, to sell their work.
Content mills use a combination of cheap by the word writers, sometimes in the U.S., but often overseas at low pay, to rapidly generate “stories”. Some content mill writers will churn out six stories per day, every day, and some will use AI to create drafts. The business works through online distribution – MSN Start, Yahoo News are now content mill distributors. Anyone can set up a blog-like web site and submit to those distributors. The goal is to get just enough clicks to cover the costs – and may be 10% will get shared and go viral, generating sufficient income from ad clicks. The quality of “reporting” on these content mills ranges from awful to sometimes okay, but is typically fluffy content material designed for rapid production, emotional hooks with click-bait titles.
So now you know – this is unfortunately the future of “journalism” as the old model – local newspaper monopolies employing large staffs of reporters – no longer exists. It’s all click-bait content mill garbage now. Some of the sites have convincing fake author profiles and photos – many of which I reverse image searched to (a) stock photo libraries, and (b) the same photo appearing as half a dozen different authors! Sure signs of deceit and fakery.
Here’s the list, which via the distribution network is set up to display one country name per page, to maximize potential ad impacts. This is why there are lots of “10 best things” or “15 places” articles on the content mill distribution web sites – they are designed for automatically placing one item per page.
- Italy
- Thailand
- Japan
- France
- Iceland
- Egypt
- Spain
- Greece
- Cuba
- Mexico
- South Africa
- Australia
- New Zealand
- India
- Canada
- Morocco
- Indonesia
- United Kingdom