"After you're done with the wheat, I want five topical blog posts."

How did The Huffington Post come to be valued at $315 million so quickly? In part by gaming SEO tactics much more cleverly than other media outlets. Search engine executive Rich Krenta, quoted in The New York Times, calls SEO-driven practices “heroin drip” publishing:

They had this really good content at the beginning, but they realize the more S.E.O. they do, the more money they make, and the pressure really pushes down the quality on their sites.

HuffPo’s other profitable tactic: not paying its writers. David Carr, in his Times article “At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs,” describes how the most successful new media players (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) all find ways to have their users generate free content which is then sold back to them or to advertisers: He writes: “This new generation of content companies have created the equivalent of a refrigerator that manufactures and consumes its own food.” He then quotes Reuters product manager Anthony De Rosa:

We live in a world of Digital Feudalism,” he wrote. “The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land….We are being played for suckers to feed the beast, to create content that ends up creating value for others.

As Carr writes: “If and when the folks at Twitter cash out, some tiny fraction of that value will have been created by me.” To use another metaphor, the new content economy is an industry without a union, drowning in a swarm of eager-to-work scabs. It’s a system where the platform barons reap the rewards while their digital serfs get nothing. Unionizing the whole world seems impossible. What’s to be done?

One small step in the right might be seen at Readability, a popular text viewing app that offers to pay out a portion of its fees back to content providers. Taking this idea of micro payments and content equity to a larger scale presents a possible solution: if a social network like Diaspora paid its users a fraction of its profits, perhaps it could eventually woo away some of the Facebook serfs/scabs. Last year Newsweek reported that crowdsourcing has been losing steam. Let’s hope this means people are slowly becoming less willing to give it away for free. Otherwise content will only be created by hobbyists, and quality will be cheapened to the point of trash.