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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This sounds suspiciously like A Real Job.

I think that's the kicker - he's providing a real service!

People are looking for this information. He's providing it for them. The fact that he's choosing both what topics to provide and is not personally an expect and outsources is really more a product of an intelligent business operation that it is a nefarious idea.

This actually sounds like something that could revolutionize modern media really.

He's not providing any useful service. He's taking traffic and ad revenues away from legitimate sites while providing low quality content, which wastes people's time (hence they navigate away clicking the only links available: ads).

Google's fault.

There's an assumption that the articles that he's having written are of low quality. It's possible that they might not be, and might be informative enough for users to find out what they might be looking for.

At $8 a pop? I expect they're complete drivel.

I found this site as a "sample" of SEO writing from the guy he links to. Seems to be high enough quality to me.

http://www.businessaviationtraining.com/

That's not a made-for-adsense site. It's heavy on SEO, and looks indeed like high quality content, but for a different purpose. The content on a made-for-adsense site is designed to look good enough to fool Google, yet not helpful enough so the visitor has to click on a ad link to find something better.

99% of the web is low quality drivel, often wrong, misinformed and uneducated opinion pieces.

If he was writing all of that content himself would you still have a problem? If not, then what makes him any different than any other two bit blogger - you (presumably) and I included?

If outsourcing is your problem, then that's another story altogether. The provider he linked to seems to output relatively high quality pieces. One would suppose that you could get a refund on your $8 if you really were dissatisfied.

Everyone in the media/blog industry write with an eye on optimizing advertising revenues. The difference I guess is how much you care about what you write and how much you care about your readership (your integrity if you will).

Sure makes sense to me. Spend a year or two building a business that returns $10-15K a month. I then have a choice of continuing to build my income, pulling a Tim Ferris, or putting it into maintenance mode and working on something for the fun of it.

$15K/month * 12 months/year= $180K/year. Not a bad paying job, either.

Yes. But there is one principal difference - the money will continue to flow even when he stops doing it.

For a while, yes. But not forever.

It is a real job, but if he makes that kind of money every month it's quite alright. I assume that he could stop doing that and it would still pay off for quite some time.

Remember the guy who was loudly complaining that google suddenly changed its algorithm and his site, which was nothing but an auto-generated directory, suddenly was excluded? Good for them.

Despite providing some ways for folks like this operator to partly game the system, Google has been on the for-front of forcing sites to have something of unique value in order to reach top ranking.

It really is. That's why I don't understand why he wouldn't channel that creativity towards a business that has more meaning. Still, he he won't, you and I can by learning from him. Seems like a smart guy.

Why would he? This is essentially passive income -- a more traditional business requires more traditional hours and workload. If you have an automatic moneymaker, you don't trade that in for something you have to tend to.

yes but its putting considerable time and intellect into a very vulnerable asset. google inevitably changes the way it does things and then its time to start over. and with each keyword he is competing with passionate and dedicated people (the winning side of any war is filled with these) that view their efforts as something more than a hack or arbitrage.

While that's a good point, Google would basically have to remove adsense to have any measurable effects on this business.

These aren't worthless placeholders, they're valuable collections of decent information. He is speeding the ranking process a bit, but that would come eventually.

It doesn't seem like he is spending that much time to accomplish this kind of income. He IS handling the interesting parts(data mining the google data.) and outsourcing the boring/time consuming bits of writing the actual content.

I don't understand the logic that says you shouldn't do something because what your doing today may not be possible a year from now.

In the meantime, this guy is pulling in a pretty healthy paycheck; I would assume he will be better prepared than most to handle any changes that come up.

think of it terms of option value. its relatively cheap to invest talent into something with bigger (as a function of time) payoff. when you make the point he is talented you are right, this makes the discrepancy in option value larger.

That clarifies it for me, thank you.

why couldn't he do both? having a less meaningful job that you use to fund a more meaningful but lower paying one is a common solution.

I dont understand why you would call this a business that doesnt have much meaning. Hes basically a more modern version of newspapers, and magazines. They hire editors, and content producers, pick topics of interest, and make money off of advertising.

So from my perspective hes just a smaller scale Rupert Murdoch.

Too many newspapers today are just publishing tons of stuff from the wire and then writing one or two local fluff stories to go along with the local sports scores and grandma's bragbook.

Yeah, doing what he says might sound like a real job, but doing what he does is probably fun. Why would anyone who is making 15k a month tell others how to make 15k a month for free! I don't see business people going around telling others how do to business for free. I mean literally he is giving away "trade secrets".

Well, that is the illusion of course as most probably he does none of that but sit in his chair and think up ways of how making money through adsense may be done and turn it into awesome sounding language with plenty of cliche and then get plenty of posters saying ohh thank you you are my god I love you so much and most probably hardly any of them will implement what he said and if they do they will prob not make as much as he says cus the work sounds very time intensive.

"I don't see business people going around telling others how do to business for free."

Sure you do. Just look at this website. Or Signal vs. Noise or your local SMBA or Chamber of Commerce...

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