Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466 - Sept 2024 (297 comments)
Most media organizations have a small number of in-house journalists on verticals that make sense.
The rest of the content is curated and brought in from content partners and written outside of the news organization.
In practice they function more like a social media feed than traditional newspapers. I’m no fan of CNN, but this isn’t exactly a scandal, media had to adapt to keep up with so much being on social media these days, they all do this.
"Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site."
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
That's why it's all hush-hush within the industry.
I think a much more simple answer is that syndication has always been hush-hush because branding and brand trust is a key part of media marketing. Your local newspaper in the 90s had a ton of syndicated stories too but it was all published under your local paper's hometown moniker.
The content farm company is now trying to buy the original Forbes company.
So when our media companies become small subsidiaries of affiliate content farms then yea I think it’s a bit disturbing.
Traditional newspapers would get stories from things like AP, and then the editors would decide what to run. They’d also have reporters that wrote local stories, etc.
I’d argue that any news site that has eliminated all those roles is already out of business and is simply burning down their brand at this point.
Even reporters have left me. Savannah Guthrie, she has left the White House press corps to host the Today show. Norah O’Donnell left the briefing room to host CBS This Morning. Jake Tapper left journalism to join CNN.¹ https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/fashion/best-leggings-on...
² https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/pet-insurance/best-..., https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/best-pet-insurance
That's also why they publish only a couple of stories per day instead of hundreds, why they never cover breaking news, why there's a donate button (as opposed to now-standard paywalls), why there's no ads, why the interface appears cleaner etc. If we were talking about tech companies, it'd be like comparing Wikimedia/Mozilla/Internet Archive to traditional for-profit tech companies. To an untrained eye there is no difference, but a somewhat trained eye quickly realises that their incentives are completely different.
(Disclaimer: I work for a different non-profit investigative journalism organization.)
In traditional journalism using wire stories (or "curated content partners"), the publisher (Forbes, CNN, etc.) pays for the content.
In the case of CNN Underscore, the "content partners" are paying CNN to use their good name to peddle advertorial content. Like if I want to run a cryptocurrency scam, I can pay CNN or Forbes to run a story on their website touting the benefits of my fake product. To a non-observant reader, it will appear to actually be coming from CNN or Forbes.
This is a long way from CNN running something from the Associated Press or Reuters.
How free* media works. The media landscape has sadly divided into assuming only those who can pay for news want to be informed or have their views challenged. The poor get ads and echo chambers.
They sell stories to other news outlets to publish on their own website.
They are presenting content as their own under questionable sources that they don't reveal. It proves they are being less genuine when doing so makes them money.
It looks like you mean: "Let me break down how a certain portion of the media industry that I'm familiar with works."
"The media industry" is vast, complex, diverse, and far more interesting than internet content farms, poorly-run legacy brands, or even most of what's on the internet.
Now, to be clear, I'm not exactly excusing CNN for this, but literally for years now I've rolled my eyes at the extremely spammy/low quality/clickbait ads that have appeared on CNN articles online. The fact that they've outsourced part of their "Underscored" site, which isn't exactly journalism to begin with, is not something I care about. And in case you missed it, journalism has had a blood bath over the past 25 years. While I think what CNN is doing in terms of affiliate ads is scammy, can I really blame them? Hardly anyone wants to pay for journalism these days, but journalists still want to eat. At least with these clickbait ads I find them so low quality that they don't confuse me into being "real" articles.
This seems to be a case of knowledge without context being a dangerous thing in the wrong hands.
In response, many of the most used web sites flooded their own sites with transparently fake product reviews full of SEO phrases about “we spent N weeks testing K products to root out the very best” and very little else. The actual reviews would be pretty much copy-pasted from the description provided on the product producer’s site.
And, that’s how Google made itself useless for finding product reviews.
There are a few disparate incentives. One is a political desire to buttress the "official truths" of the legacy media. The other is a market incentive for the dying legacy media sites to earn revenue.
There is a third, related market incentive for the dissatisfied media consumers. CNN isn't as compelling as it was two decades ago. Eyeballs and ears are naturally straying towards the perceived value of alternative media sources. Therefore, to continue the ancien regime, it becomes necessary for Google to prop up CNN and others.
There is a possible world where Google creates value by indexing and sorting through a decentralized and open Internet. This chain of events does not support that. The trend is for gatekeepers to panic. The search results have been sabotaged as a result.
Is Google more valuable as a gatekeeper for established institutions? Can that amount to more value than the potential ad revenue of a larger web? Time will tell.
Like a article with a picture of some fat person, a picture of a child star, and the headline "you can't believe how child star whatever looks like today!". But the fat person is not the former child and nowhere to be seen in the article, etc.
Those sites are as reputable as pornsites.
They super-obviously did that some time around ‘08 or ‘09. Basically just gave up on the cat-and-mouse game they’d played with spam for years, based on actual content and (what they hoped they managed to suss out as) organic linking, and switched to heavy reputation- and size-weighting instead. It was a giant shift in their search’s behavior and unlike anything they’d done before, not subtle at all.
The upshot of this is that no system is impossible to game.
I presume they made the change because their search results were filling up with blogspam, and there was no algorithm that could detect a high-quality review from a spam one.
So what do you think would have been the right approach?
If there was a solution to this problem from the search engine's point of view 5 years ago, which I do not stipulate but let's roll with it, there isn't one now. ChatGPT can overcome basically all detection techniques when combined with the current amount of efforts already largely successfully avoiding detection, and it will continue to get better. There are no signals for random unattested web content that will separate what we want from stuff constructed to look like what we want but with embedded motivations or content we don't.
A web of trust may be inevitable, but it's not like that can't be attacked either, especially past the first hop. It seems inevitable that slowly but very surely our trust is going to get pulled in much, much more tightly than it is now. I don't see much that can be done about that, even in theory. It was a historical accident that we ever could trust random websites to not be 100% focused on their own interests, simply because the tech to do that wasn't there yet. Now it is, and we will be entering a world where we can not trust any free resources, whether we like it or not.
Try it: https://www.google.com/search?q=macbook+m3+pro+review+-affil...
Reviews financed via affiliate links are just camouflaged ads. So Google should offer a filter to remove all of them.
I add similar qualifiers to almost all of my searches. They make the web feel like it's 2010 again.
Apple uses algorithmic ranking by story, and pays news sites by article views. It is basically all spam. If you block the spam sites, their stories still show up in your feed with a note that you blocked the site.
Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization, like podcast apps do. They should steer you back to reading the sources you’ve opted into, and mix in a bit of stories from related news organizations, not stories with high content similarity, or high “trending” scores.
(As far as I know, Apple News+ is the only product still operating in the paid news aggregator space, but if there’s another one, I’d love to hear about it.)
In the one hand, Google paid good quality websites more money for trash content and engagement bait than quality content. So they adapted to that new market reality.
Meanwhile, the real money maker - Search - gradually got filled up with lower quality content and now it’s imploding.
Google buying DoubleClick has a lot of parallels to what happened with Boeing.
In that scenario, the search engine could show an empty page plus their screened ad network results.
Perhaps a link for querying Reddit or other social media.
For the most profitable/contested review queries, some combination of algo and paid humans for feedback/curation.
I really hope for them it does exist because otherwise Google is screwed.
Does the Wirecutter no longer actually do the leg work?
I was under the impression that the generic "news"/"information" on many sites is purchased (or otherwise obtained through some kind of business relationship) from some other organization.
And I just don't get this perspective from the article:
"For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?"
I guess I can't figure out what the problem is supposed to be here. I don't think there's necessarily a problem with fleshing out a site with generic content. I would guess CNN has an agreement with the content provider on the general character of content, and can surely opt out of things they don't want to be associated with.
FWIW, I opened "CNN underscored money" and at the top of the page it says:
"Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN Newsroom. CNN earns a commission from partner links on the site but the reporting here is always independent and objective." (plus there's an "advertiser disclosure" link but I didn't click on it).
I just don't get what the problem is here.
You are effectively saying 'what's the big deal if they admit it'. The big deal is that that's not what they're admitting. CNN Underscored is a separate team within CNN, running an in-house content farm, and that's what they're admitting to. CNN Underscored Money is an entirely separate company, running a third-party content farm, which they are going to lengths to hide the separation from CNN Underscored.
Google's TOS permits you to run terrible content farms. It even permits you to rehost third-party terrible content farms with zero oversight. But it does not allow you to claim this content as your own and hide its third-party origin, if you rehost it with zero oversight.
Anytime I hear outrage rhetoric i lose all interest in the author's words.
Its like they have completely forgotten what relativity is.
> Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site.
It means that consumers will be shown reviews written by affiliate marketers rather than real people because the affiliate marketers get to leech off of Forbes's, CNN's, or USA Today's domain reputation. Despite this, Google is either unwilling or unable to derank major sites over this issue.
Why do you think there isn't oversight or involvement from CNN?
A hard one to define is a common recommendation is that a legit news site will look and feel professional. A more specific one is that a fake news site will be filled with a large number of ads. That doesn't even touch on the other factors like unbiased articles that share both sides of an issue.
I'm an independent and as far as I can tell there is zero attempt at unbiased factual reporting of the news.
1. You run a content website with a strong domain rating. 2. They approach you with an offer of creating a subsite (your brand + advisor, marketplace, etc) on your domain 3. They write all the content and completely manage the subsite - you have 0 risk (aside from brand risk) 4. You split the affiliate revenues from the subsite 5. The internet is now full of shitty content shilling diet pills and google can't figure it out
I half expect to start seeing new incarnations of things like Prodigy or Compuserve spin up, aiming to provide an Internet-within-Internet type of experience. Without advertising, purely pay-to-play. Sure, a lot of regular people will never pay for such a thing, but I bet there are enough of us that will pay for good quality content (and shielding from crap) that it could be viable. Maybe the 'net gets balkanized and the 'free' part left as a wasteland.
(or maybe I'm just a grumpy old man and I should go get a cup of coffee and quit my bitching)
Well there is good news: Wikipedia is still around and it's as good as ever.
I share your sentiments about Google results. I've thought before about setting myself up a little terminal which denies access to everything on the web besides Wikipedia and .edu. That's where most of the good stuff online is. (ok, maybe Atlas Obscura and Sheldon Brown's bicycle page are allowed too)
For instance, Experian stole my credit card number once. The fraud department at my national megabank said that Experian was responsible for over half their case load.
You’d think that the credit card processing networks would have blocked the Experian payment processing account at that point. I think they would have blocked pretty much any other company on earth.
Wait, what? This is beyond wild. How did you know it was Experian? Have you since found any other evidence for this?
This doesn't mean the stories published are false, or even inaccurate - but there's a big negative space in their media coverage. E.g. if culture war issues are amplified, but there are no stories on industrial policy, infrastructure problems, manufacturing job and supply chain analysis - that's deliberate. No, it's not 'what the public wants', it's what the owners of these media outlets want their readers to be thinking about.
See also partisan views from this thread (as opposed to this non-partisan comment):
Under regular news reporting journalists have no legal obligation to their readers or the truth. They can say anything they want, essentially. It can be accurate, or not. It can be the truth, or not. It really doesn't matter. You can be lying for personal profit or political effect or any reason you want and it really isn't something you can get sued over. Just have to avoid tripping over defamation laws.
Where as if you are dealing with financial reporting there is legal liability. It is possible to get busted for committing fraud, it is possible to get sued for misleading information.
So keeping these sides of the business completely separated is probably a good way to limit liability.
"Seems an appropriate time to post my favourite piece on news addiction by Charles Simic in the NYRB. "I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/
Edit: Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet who lived through WWII and saw some really grisly things, some described briefly in the article, hence "after everything I had lived through and learned in my life...""
Listen. Think about what is said. Think harder about what is not said. Check another source. Repeat.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
I do not believe centralized content distribution channels will ever act as a reliable source of information.
Find distribution channels that keep you plugged into the zeitgeist; some form of streaming our collective consciousness.
And then do your own research on the topics that matter to you.
"they control the media you can't believe anything they say!" being spewed on the platform with by-far the largest market share/reach.
Having an entirely separate staff, with a separate website, publish content under your name without your input ought to be a five alarm fire for editorial staff. But there’s some affiliate cash up for grabs so some senior exec somewhere okayed it.
There’s a tech angle here too: if it weren’t for SEO they might we’ll be operating out of cnnunderscore.com or whatever, but the SEO juice of a page on cnn.com is too tempting to pass up.
Answer: You don't know. You're just speculating.
In Canada, for example, it's hard to throw a stone and not hit a foreign-owned PostMedia news outlet.
What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
When I consider events or situations I've had direct knowledge of, or where I've had access to direct witness accounts and raw footage that I trust, some of the worst reporting in my opinion has been from CBC News. With CBC being a Crown corporation, CBC News could perhaps be considered the most inherently "Canadian-owned" of the mainstream news outlets.
On the other hand, for such situations, I've generally found reporting from Postmedia's various outlets to be among the most accurate, complete, and objective of that from the mainstream outlets, even if it may be considered foreign-owned.
Move slow, break countries.
If he wasn't going to investigate this, who would? CNN? USA Today?
Wikipedia is the most reliable source of news/perspective on issued but it can get contaminated if entities given the "reliable sources" label republish unreliable or biased dreck.
There weren’t any.
Instead they had little blurbs, online they’d be called “tweets” or “posts” mostly submitted by readers.
That was journalism in a midwestern city in the 1800s.
They are all rags.
There are a couple of bloggers who cover local government, otherwise there's really no in-depth local reporting on anything anymore.
The issue is that CNN is using their domain authority to boost this drivel affiliate Money content, and hiding the fact that they are doing it by using layer 7 routing to cloak the site. If CNN used a subdomain, e.g. money.cnn.com, Google could learn that this content should be judged independently from the rest of the site.
This money content isn’t competing fairly. Google is being tricked to think these Money articles should have the same inherent authority as other CNN articles.
Where this impacts the consumer is that the first articles for popular search terms aren’t the best, but instead written by content marketers chasing the highest affiliate. This crowds out legitimate sites (e.g. in depth reviews of the best mortgage lenders) because they can’t hope to rank higher than CNN for the same term.
At the very least, this “path based” cloaking of content authorship should be detectable by Google, but it’s a game of whack a mole, unfortunately.
I think if you had a human curate the best content written for these popular SEO’d search terms, they’d be able to find the diamonds from the rough. That gives some hope that algorithms can improve to rank the most useful content for readers.
It’s also why Reddit is so popular as a source of content in Google.
These sites are officially linked to from the parents (CNN and USA Today in this case), with whom they no doubt have a revenue-sharing agreement. They're very real in all senses of the word. The third party in question (Forbes marketplace) is not trying to fraudulently set up some parallel CNN and USA Today websites without their authorization.
This just confirms it.
I feel the title of the blog entry is maybe a bit “extreme,” but it does show some well-done sleuthing.
Media companies have had to drastically change their business models, lately, and this is just another part of it.
Seems the real intention here is say that since there are affiliate ads and advertorials on the site, the entire site is somehow "fake news".
That's quite a stretch.
A fake news site would say something like Covid is "just the flu". Or maybe, let's say, endorse lies about an election being rigged.
Or focus on new conspiracy theories. Every. Single. Week.
Neither site does anything like that — No reputable news organization would ever do something that irresponsible, right?
That would be fake news.
Every news site has advertising sections
https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/about
"Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN newsroom. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a commission."
The disclaimer is disingenuous, because they're trading on the idea people will ignore it, while they can turn around and say everyone is in group of people who not only read the text, but also understand what "independently from the CNN newsroom" is a euphemism for.
"look at the HTML it catches the lie!" - meanwhile, the 'lie' also exposed in clear text in a banner across the top of page. 1337 h4xing indeed.
Ahem, bbc.co.uk/news * *?
* Note, not bbc.com ;-)
* Also, editorially, BBC News has also gone a little downhill in recent times. But it's all relative.
I agree them functionally selling ad-space is annoying; but it's also exposed in clear text as such at the top of every underscored page and article.
Giant nothingburger.
It's an expose showing how deep the rabbit hole goes on this one topic, a reminder that people with money are using their money to make more money by taking control of the internet, to keep all eyes on them, to lie, cheat, manipulate, and inveigle their way into your eyeballs by any means necessary, and that they will continue to do so as long as there is a penny to be made by it.
It shows that Google is implicitly permitting this system of deception, that there is a financial conglomerate that is eviscerating the corpse of a once-proud financial giant like FORBES in order to wear its skin and work its mouth like a Muppet advertising face creams and cockroach repellents.
If you're not viscerally affected by this inhuman grotesquery, you are made of sterner stuff than I. It's appalling and a powerful metaphorical reminder of our individual insignificance against the power of money, how nothing is sacred, and nothing is safe and sane on the internet.
Anyway, I’m not surprised. As far as I’m concerned they’re already out of business (just like National Geographic, which currently employs zero staff writers).
I wouldn’t seek it out, but it wasn’t on my short list of sites to avoid in news aggregators and HN like it is today.
(I’ve never heard of the reporters they fired for being too liberal, but that event marked a sharp change in their strategy, where they said they wanted to target Fox News and Newsmax fans, and that they were changing their reporting standards to cater to those audiences.)
Just follow a few high quality independent journalists and also let the open-source algorithm rank content to show you.