Some interesting detail on what, exactly, AOL was paying for when they purchased The Huffington Post last week. Similar in some ways to the strategy used by so-called "content farms" such as Demand Media, The Huffington Post employs techniques that mine the internet for popular trends and searches. Once a popular set of keywords are determined (e.g. "what time is the Superbowl?"), Huffington Post writers often create articles geared specifically to capturing clicks from search engines for that content.
To be fair, The Huffington Post also creates a good deal of original editorial content that is less engineered toward search engine eyeballs. But their search engine-tuned content chops are what bring in the money and triggered the acquisition. I'll leave the determination of whether they are contributing to the rise of junk content up to you. Full article here.
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