So says Jason Calicanis, former the scribe of Silicon Alley, who now runs one of the web's biggest content farms, Mahalo.

In a great report from Danny Sulivan at Search Engine Land, we learn that Calicanis is worried that the rapid expansion of content farming has angered Google, and that once the search engine cracks down, the entire industry will suffer. 

“The one rule of working with Google is don’t make them look stupid. If you make ‘The Google’ look stupid, they’ll fuck you up."

Calicanis says updates to his site with original video and improvements in quality quality are causing his costs to skyrocket, "But I can sleep at night again."

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Collins' story described her "ill-fated stint as a freelance copy editor" at Demand Media, a company that churns out approximately 4,000 articles per day based on topics provided by algorithms based on search engine queries. The result is such scintillating fare as this gem: "How to Draw a Chubby Pony." Demand Media freelancers are paid starting at $3.50 an article.

Critics argue that the "content farms" create dumbed-down poorly researched article and videos. Some even say the business model is a serious threat to the already-endangered journalism industry.

Collins' article contains plenty of ammo for critics of content farms. She describes horrifying automated application processes, questionably accurate content, and ridiculous paperwork.

"I was to be an intermediary between the web at large and the raw, reliably weird substance that results from the unlikely union of algorithmically created topic assignments and writers of, shall we say, widely variable competence," Collins wrote of her role as copy editor.

Regardless of the critics, the "content farms" are finding no shortage of investors and struggling journalists willing to work for low wages.

In May, Yahoo purchased Associated Content for a little over $100 million. Associated Content generates approximately 50,000 pieces of content per month. Demand Media claims to get approximately 96.4 million monthly unique users for its six properties. The company is prepping for an IPO before the end of the month.

Quinn Daly, spokesperson for Demand Media declined to comment on this story, citing a "quiet period" before the impending IPO.

"According to SEC regulations we can't comment," Daly told The Observer.

Collins stopped working for Demand after earning an average of $7 an hour rather than $20, which she said "was the lowest freelance editing wage I could begin to justify working for." Collins might not be willing to work for $7 an hour, but in this difficult climate, many media refugees are clearly willing to take that rate.

Then again, Collins was willing to write for The Awl for free. Collins told The Observer that she wasn't paid for her post. 

"The way I see it, there's obviously a form of compensation involved which is non monetary, i.e., the platform for telling my story. It's fair to say that I have different standards for what I'm willing to contribute to the type of projects I believe in vs. the type I don't, and also for my craft (writing) vs. my trade (editing)," Collins said. 

The willingness of writers like Collins to participate in passion projects means that the content farms might not be the only web publishing model with a chance for success. In fact, though Collins wasn't paid for her post, sources tell The Observer that The Awl has started paying some of its contributors. 

Associated Content, which is based in Denver, is one of a handful of newfangled media companies that pay freelance contributors to generate stories based on popular web search terms. As we've noted, Yahoo has been moving aggresively, as of late, on multiple fronts to ramp up its original content production.

From the release:

This strategic move extends Yahoo's ability to provide high quality, personally relevant content for the benefit of more than 600 million users as well as tens of thousands of advertisers. As Yahoo! enhances its social, mobile, local, and media offerings, the acquisition of Associated Content reinforces the company's longstanding promise to offer the best of the Web -- by combining Associated Content's approximately 380,000 contributors who provide rich and varied content on a broad array of passion points, with Yahoo's leadership in partnering with established content brands and the award-winning team of editors and experts from Yahoo!.

"Combining our world-class editorial team with Associated Content's makes this a game-changer," said Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo! Inc. "Together, we'll create more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network. These are important aspects of building engaging consumer experiences on Yahoo!, and one of the reasons why we're one of the most visited destinations online."

I refer here to the anonymous Iranian upon whom, last week, was bestowed a George Polk Award, one of journalism’s top honors, for the video he or she captured of a female protester as she died from a sniper’s bullet during last year’s Green Revolution. The woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, instantly became a national martyr and international cause célèbre. The identity of the individual who immortalized her death—described in the citation as “a brave bystander with a cell-phone camera”—is still unknown, but there’s no reason to think he/she was anything other than a civilian.

The selection was received as a statement—about the democratization that needs to happen in Iran, yes, but also about the democratization and decentralization that’s already happening in the news business. At the risk of giving too much credit to a bunch of awards-committee grandees, there’s an important lesson here. In the latter half of the last century, journalism mutated from a relatively prestige-free trade into a hoity-toity profession that, like medicine and law, involves graduate degrees and six-figure salaries. But journalism is not a profession, or even a trade, really. It’s an act. And anyone who performs that act is, at that moment, a journalist.

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This recognition comes as the journalistic establishment slides beneath the water line, taking with it the six-figure jobs necessary to pay off all those J-school loans. And the people benefiting from this aren’t just the amateurs. It’s no coincidence that in the same week Neda’s videographer got his due, the Pulitzer Prize committee reportedly agreed to accept a submission from The National Enquirer for its reporting on John Edwards’ extramarital monkeyshines. Tabloid reporters are historically the untouchables of the journalistic caste system, too sullied by the trash-sifting work they do to move anywhere but down the food chain. But that was in the old days, when the logo on your business card meant a damn.

In essence, the market for acts of journalism has gone from a cartel-based system to something approximating free enterprise, where it’s the value of the goods themselves that matters, not the reputation of the vendor. That, in itself, is a great thing. But it has some unnerving implications. Start-ups like Demand Media and Associated Content are taking the free-market ethos to its logical conclusion, producing content based on algorithms that calculate consumer demand and sourcing the production to a far-flung network of low-paid freelancers. (AOL, my primary employer, has a venture called Seed that operates on similar principles.) To say that professional journalists are skeptical that such “robo-content” can ever replace the work of experienced full-timers is a vast understatement. But plenty of smart people think otherwise. Betsy Morgan, the former CEO of the Huffington Post, tells me she believes the new-breed content farmers could do to legacy media companies what the Japanese did to American automakers in the 1980s, undermining their economics forever. “Demand is well positioned to migrate up market with their content as Toyota did with their car models,” Morgan says. “That’s where things could get interesting for the established brands.”

As someone who’s still using his old-media salary to pay off school loans, I hope Morgan’s wrong. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Jeff Bercovici is the media columnist for AOL’s Daily Finance.

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