BuzzFeed: We don't pull 'articles' due to advertiser pressure VERY OFTEN Devilish mediabomination site BuzzFeed has confessed that it removed "content"* because it drew complaints from the site's advertising partners. "Editor-in-chief" Ben Smith sent the results of an internal review to staff last Saturday which revealed three instances on his watch in which content had been removed after it had …
They certainly are not doing news.
I've noticed a lot of articles on Google News where they're nonsense word soup.
At the bottom, they'll say "this article was regenerated by the editors from internet information"
It looks like they're using Eliza to mash together articles about a particular topic. Seriously.
mod-up! I mean , advertising of most things is just noise.
Take the Apple Watch. Loads of speculation, a release, reviews.
If the first we heard about it was the reviews, i doubt there would be any difference in the sales.
The problem is that advertising has never been about selling YOUR product as much as making everyone else's product invisible. In drug design we call this allosteric modulation....
For those of you who have seen Red Dwarf, the books were very good. In the first one they had a story of 2 cola companies in the 24th century and one of them sent a fleet of ships to make a number of supernovae go off in synch and form an advertising constellation when viewed from the Earth. They would burn a slogan into the sky for decades....
P.
In some of my work elsewhere Google News is a major source of traffic. Spot what's going on there, write something, see if it gets traffic from Google News (yes, I know, I know).
And those nonsense word soup ones, they're actually quite interesting. What they're doing (and anyone want to join in on recreating this little scammette*?) is:
1) Checking G News for what stories are being covered.
2) Scraping one or two (usually just the one in fact) off whatever site is being displayed on G News.
3) Running the scraped content through Google Translate.
4) Running it back into English again.
5) Publish and gain thousands to tens of thousands in traffic.
Quite cute: the only difficulty in the process seems to be getting accepted as a G New source site in the first place.
* I tend not to actually partake of scammettes but I am rather an aficionado of them.
Cretinous though they may be, they're not the cretinousest. Some of their competitors make them look positively journalistic.
I saw a heavily pumped article on one of the other sites which was a strong of somebody's URBEX photos, one per page, credited to 'imgur' (as if the host somehow controls the ownership), each page having 6-8 ads, with a lot of things on the page that look a lot like 'next' buttons but are clickthroughs, and some piss-poor commentary on the pictures in a vain effort at some kind of journalistic integrity. Basically, wholesale ripoff of someone's photos, not even hosted, wrapped in as many adverts as imaginable. Genuinely depressing that there's someone with even less journalistic instincts than the company this article is about (who don't need another mention for spiders to bump up listings)
BuzzFeed's "serious journalism" is actually excellent, maybe Pulitzer-quality, and far more in-depth than most other news anymore. At least it began that way. Why they even associate that with their "10 things doctors hate about celebrity nudes" trash brand is beyond me, you'd think they'd want them as separate as possible.
It's blogging for morons, by morons - morons who don't much care for being corrected either. There was one particularly insidious article, the exact subject matter of which I cannot recall, but the crux of it was that the twat writing it was too thick to think that 'cum' could be anything other than a euphemism for 'semen', and how rude the UK was because there were "so many" towns/villages with 'cum' in them, which the brainiac deduced MUST be a misspelling of 'come', not a Latin word meaning 'with' (coz they don't teach classics anymore, and here's a prime example of why it needs to be reinstated to the curriculum forthwith).
I got banned from commenting because I pointed out what it ACTUALLY meant.
And now I've admitted to reading BF. Don't worry, I'm long cured.
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