Remember content mills/content farms? Of course you do. You might have worked for one. Or even run your own mill in days gone by.
Content marketing and content mills go way back. Just as low-quality, efficiently produced fast fashion has come to dominate most people’s wardrobes, content mills have had a similarly outsized impact on the internet.
So why are mills so popular?
It’s simple—the internet IS content.
“Content is king,” said Bill Gates back in 1996, long before Youtubers and TikTok stars became richer than royalty.
Companies looking to grab their slice of the attention economy turn to low-cost content mills as a quick fix.
They pay mills pennies for content that might rank. And the mills pay students and writers in places like India a pittance to produce said content.
But there’s always a nagging problem: quality.
As anybody who has ever dabbled in content mill arbitrage (take money from client->outsource work to content mill->keep profit) will tell you, these articles are always worse than bad. Editing takes longer than starting from scratch. You wouldn’t sell this content to your worst enemy.
Thanks to AI, just like the watermill, the content mill is becoming obsolete. Why pay for low-quality, high-volume content when you can just whack a prompt into ChatGPT and let it do its thing?
However, this has led to the rise of another adversary: the AI content agency. AI has eaten content mills for breakfast—and it’s now got higher quality content agencies in its sights for lunch.
So with this in mind, we decided to do a little digging into Rocket Content, one of the new AI Content Agencies that’s recently emerged onto the scene.
Here’s their deal.
Rocket Content charges between $0.01 and $0.02 per word for content that’s clearly been written by ChatGPT. All clients have to do is provide a site URL and keywords.
Rocket Content then:
- Conducts keyword research
- Uses AI writing tools to create content that ranks.
- Adds a few extras, such as custom images, on-page SEO, affiliate links, and CTAs.
At first glance, it’s easy to be skeptical about businesses like Rocket Content
It’s an insult to the profession.
They’re fueling a race to the bottom.
Content marketing’s about quality, not quantity.
There’s some truth in the above statements—but that doesn’t mean Rocket Content’s owners are off their rocker.
If it works, it works. And if they’ve found a way to rank quickly and cheaply, hats off to them.
So herein lies the dilemma: will this model actually work?
A few weeks ago, I would have answered this question with a hard “no.” Surely Google is going to penalize content copied and pasted from ChatGPT? Otherwise, the internet will be rubbish.
But now I’m not so sure.
Firstly, the Google results page is already quite rubbish. It’s cluttered, full of ads, features sites that have obviously gamed SEO, and rarely surfaces anything that a monster company hasn’t created.
Secondly, once 90% of the content on the internet is AI generated (which at the moment feels inevitable), are they going to be able to downrank it all?
Will they downrank content created using their own generative AI tool, Bard? Not sure.
Back to Rocket Content….
What immediately struck me was their no-bullshit messaging. They’re very honest about what they are—and, most importantly, what they’re not.
“Let’s state the obvious…” they say. “OF COURSE the content is not going to the be the same quality as content produced with a robust editorial process. However, this content at $0.01/word will rank! It can be an incredibly cost effective way to test out a new site or niche, create a new cluster of content on an existing site or reinvest economically in a neglected site before spending a lot of money.”
Now, aside from the fact that this paragraph is littered with spelling mistakes and syntax errors (seriously, guys, you’re a content agency?!), the messaging is pretty solid.
They argue that while it might not be the best content in the world, it’s fast, it’s cheap, and it will rank (for now.) It’s great for testing new sites or reviving neglected ones. You can publish for $0.01 per word, wait and see if any articles gain traction, and improve any pages that do. They make a decent argument.
So with that in mind, here’s what we think.
Our take
Content from an AI content mill will likely be considerably better than from a human content mill. That said, it still won’t be good enough to put on a site you really value or expect to be read by genuine subject matter experts.
When it comes to writing for clients, we wouldn’t touch this kind of content with a 10-foot pole. It’s not worth it. It could easily be downranked hard in a future update to Google’s Helpful Content guidelines.
But if you’re a scrappy young SEO hustler or just like running experiments on the side, there’s potentially an opportunity here to launch an affiliate site (or something along those lines). Just don’t expect it to last long.