In the late 2000s, a new kind of newsroom sprang up in Southern California. It didn’t chase scandals or city hall. It chased search bars. If enough people were asking the same question online, a system would spot it, calculate the advertising value and send the assignment out to a freelancer — fast. “How to unclog a drain.” “How to train a puppy.” “How to remove candle wax.” The goal wasn’t great writing. The goal was coverage. The blank spaces of the internet were suddenly treated like farmland and content was the crop.
Demand Media became the emblem of the era. Reports at the time described the company producing more than 5,000 articles and videos a day, an assembly line of usefulness built to satisfy what people were already typing. Wall Street rewarded the model. Demand’s IPO arrived in January 2011 and the “content farm” looked like the future — volume as strategy, scale as moat.
Then the weather shifted. On Feb. 24, 2011, Google publicly announced a major ranking change aimed at pushing down “low-quality” pages — content that was thin, copycat or not very useful. It quickly became known as Google Panda. Within weeks, the factory’s dependence on search traffic became painfully clear. One Forbes analysis showed Google-referred traffic to Demand Media sites declined sharply, about 40% by mid-April compared to the start of the year.
The lesson fits today’s flood of machine-made junk without needing new terminology: When content becomes cheap, the internet fills up. Eventually, audiences and algorithms start looking for signals of credibility and intent. The pendulum always swings back. First comes the gold rush, then comes the reckoning.
That’s where Radiant comes in: We learn a client’s brand deeply enough to make smart, human calls before anything goes live — what to say, what to cut and what to save for later. The brands that last aren’t going to be the ones that publish the most; they’re going to be the ones that make every interaction worth the reader’s time. And when the next cleanup comes, those are the voices that will still be standing.
