Criticisms

Critics allege that content farms provide relatively low quality content,^[7] and that they maximize profit by producing "just good enough" material rather than high-quality articles.^[8] Articles are usually composed by human writers rather than automated processes, but they may not be written by a specialist in the subjects reported. Some authors working for sites identified as content farms have admitted knowing little about the fields on which they report.^[9] Search engines see content farms as a problem, as they tend to bring the user to less relevant and lower quality results of the search.^[10] The reduced quality and rapid creation of articles on such sites has drawn comparisons to the fast food industry^[11] and to pollution^[2]:

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Information consumers end up with less relevant or valuable resources. Producers of relevant resources receive less cash as a reward (lower clickthrough rate) while producers of junk receive more cash. One way to describe this is pollution. Virtual junk pollutes the Web environment by adding noise. Everybody but the polluters pays a price for Web pollution: search engines work less well, users waste precious time and attention on junk sites, and honest publishers lose income. The polluter spoils the Web environment for everybody else.