Demand Media (and other ad-focused sites, but most remarkably their operation) understand this deep in their bones, which is why their content is to writing what chicken McNuggets are to chicken.
You and I might consider Demand Media-style content to be shit, but there's a market for it. We might want big, meaty content written with clever words and insightful conclusions, but the mass of the market wants little snackable boneless pieces that they don't have to work too hard to digest.
Demand Media understand this. They understand that the Internet is now predominantly used by people who read at an eighth-grade level, who don't know how to use browser tabs or ctrl-f, who will go straight for the back button if presented with big blocks of text. Demand Media seek to produce huge amounts of content that is just good enough to be the most relevant content for any given long-tail search term. They do that better than anyone.
Google aren't fools, they aren't being gamed, Demand Media are just creating content that is the most relevant content for very specific search terms. It's not of great quality, but it's the best that's available. If you know how to form a search query then you can find better content most of the time, but most people have neither the ability nor the inclination. Cheap, convenient, omnipresent. It's the stuff empires are made of.
Like 99.99% of products in the world, it's not bad, it's just not for you. If you are strongly opposed to what other people consume, you have three proper grown-up options. Either take it up with them, satisfy that demand better, or ignore it. Railing against the people who fulfil that demand is going to get you nowhere.
Jason Calacanis (Mahalo's CEO) describes the site as a "trifecta of search" that includes: SERP's, answers and community. He's really on to something with this. While Mahalo has taken the low road to amass low quality SERP's and recently killed the community it built, the answers building block is truly the most important part of the content mill puzzle.
"We might want big, meaty content written with clever words and insightful conclusions, but the mass of the market wants little snackable boneless pieces that they don't have to work too hard to digest."
No one want's big, meaty content. Everyone wants to know the answer to the question they're looking for. Sometimes, that answer can be uncovered or explained with big meaty content, but the best content will answer the question that the user is searching for with as little "meat" as possible.
It's going to take content mills a while to get there, and a drastic user interface change will occur, but eventually I think that small pieces of information will exist. Similar to what happens when you type, "What time is it in Toronto" into Google, the search engine will simply return the exact answer that you're looking for. The answer might exist on Demand, it might exist on a small personal blog, however, the SE will have identified the answer to your question regardless of if you type in "How To Shave" or "Shaving Tips" or "Shaving 101".
For one thing, you may be under the impression that you -- the broad "you", HN users in general -- read on the Internet. You don't. You are a paragraph-skimming button-clicking satisficing ADHD squirrel like everyone else is. Your behavior is trivially influenced by A/B tests, and you lack sufficient insight to notice it. You click on shiny buttons. You do what calls to action tell you to do, and are exquisitely sensitive to their wording. You respond to advertising. You probably don't eat chicken McNuggets, because you think only poor people eat chicken McNuggets, and you don't even remember why you think that.
We are also clearly exceptional as a demographic. We are dramatically better educated and more literate than the mean. We're mostly male, whereas the internet is now a female majority population[1]. There is evidence to show that we behave very differently when presented with long-form content[2].
While I'm perfectly prepared to accept that our actual preferences are far more homogenous than our expressed preferences, I think the predominant error made by "our kind" is forgetting just how strange we are as a group and as individuals, at least in terms of our abilities and our expressed preferences.
As regards 'elitism', I've seen an awful lot of startups fail because they overestimated their users, but never once seen one that underestimates them. Amongst the HN community, people's first reaction to Bingo Card Creator seemed to be "who the hell pays money for that?". If it takes a bit of arrogance and disdain for us to grok the level of the average user, then so be it - no offence to HNers, but we're not exactly overflowing with humility are we?
[1] http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?code=emarketer_2000574
Demand Media seek to produce huge amounts of content that is just good enough to be the most relevant content for any given long-tail search term.
On the other hand:
If you know how to form a search query then you can find better content most of the time...
Which is it, is Demand Media the most relevant content, or is there better content? If there's better content, then Google is failing users.
I'm pretty sure that there is better content corresponding to every single piece of information that a Demand writer has ever posted online.
This is not a dig at Google, indeed its much better than it used to be, its just that its a machine with defined rules and will therefore fall foul of tricks (even if the tricks keep changing).
This is why Goole need to be scared of Facebook, as Facebook looks likely to be the first business to successfully implement a human recommendation level into search.
I came to understand that there is a balance between writing enough information that users found an article helpful but not so much information that they would not want to click on ads or related pages.
The problem of course is that when one is encouraged to write almost completely with profit and clicks in mind that eventually, their body of work becomes devalued by the audience.
Search for "recover notepad files" and the first Google result is "How to Recover an Unsaved Notepad File | eHow.com "
and then the whole article is about how you can't recover the file...with 4 adsense links at the end with most having click worthy titles like "recover deleted files"
so Google users get screwed, Google advertisers get screwed, and eHow and Google both make a few extra bucks. I'd bet that all these content farms would have been long banned by Google, if they weren't using adsense.
I don't think users get anything by seeing their site before my landing page, though (aside from "frustrated").
how much are you spending per click there?
I seem to have broken the Google AdWords interface and can't get exact data at the moment, but my CPC at content farms ranges from an average of 4 cents to an average of 8 cents. They send some of the highest quality traffic which is not direct from competitor's websites. (I wouldn't have predicted that but, hey, data knows more than I do.)
However, just like a Torrent site will rarely show up on the Google's first page for a TV show name, their algorithm needs to be adjusted to account for mills that value profit over content.