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Comment by run4yourlives | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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).

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.

Google's fault.

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