Farming is Bad?

Image by The U.S. National Archives

My business teacher explained that the most efficient and least-risk strategy is to determine what a target customers wants and produce it quickly.  I’ve seen this strategy illustrated with the Content Farm.  He would probably say that premium quality is a consideration for established brands moving upmarket, not worth major investment in version one.

The problem with content farms is that they were able to hide competing high-quality content, eliminating market pressure to improve. These businesses would just skip ahead to increase scale and profit.  Imagine that you found some way to hide your best competition so that customers only found you. Doing this wouldn’t be very efficient for the customers.

Established brands have to worry about their reputations. They have a business incentive to play fair and deliver quality above their peers.  I expect that established brands will want to stay away from content farming and other tricks, while poor brands have very little to lose.