Inside the World of AI Content Agencies

Greetings, fellow marketers. Welcome to AI Marketing School, where our goal is to empower us all with expert-level knowledge at the intersection of artificial intelligence and marketing.

This week we're going inside the shady world of AI content agencies, where the bots are always typing, the content is always flowing, and the grammar is always questionable.

We'll also test-drive Tome, the AI-powered storytelling solution and PowerPoint slayer. Let's see if it lives up to the hype and its juicy $300 million valuation.

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Onward!

1. Notes 📝

Welcome to Content Mill 2.0

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:

1. Conducts keyword research

2. Uses AI writing tools to create content that ranks.

3. 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.

2. Essential Reading 📖

This week's A+ articles from around the web.

• How you can (and when you shouldn't) use ChatGPT to write marketing copy. (LINK)

• Writing Essays With AI: A Guide. Wonderfully written by Dan Shipper - a must-read (LINK)

• "Yesterday I used ChatGPT to write a blog post...It went straight to number 1 in Google." Fun little experiment from the descriptively-named Niche Site Lady.) (LINK)

3. Experiment 🔬

A Moment In tome...

Here's the tomeline...

tome was released in September. It reached 1m users 134 days later, was valued at 300m last week, and is still “pre-revenue.” Given its impressive credentials, we decided to put it to the test.

What is tome?

tome's software rethinks the PowerPoint system of slide-friendly, uniform tiles.

Unlike a traditional presentation, tome tiles are modular, with changes to one dynamically updating others. This means it can automatically place and size text and images dropped onto its canvas.

How does tome work?

Courtesy of its AI integration, Tome uses multiple large-language models to run queries behind-the-scenes—and, ultimately, to fulfill a user’s presentation prompt.

First, its software generates a framework for the output, setting its length and style. Next, smaller queries to the AI models fill out corresponding images and text. Users can then fine-tune the results or ask the AI to generate more pages via additional prompts.

tome can generate everything from children’s bedtime stories to 3-D prototypes, but it has resonated most as a PowerPoint and Slides killer. For example, AI meeting notes startup Supernormal raised a funding round using a pitch deck built in tome.

How we put tome to the test

We needed to put tome to the test FAST – they're about to start charging $10/mo, and the AI Marketing School endowment is running dry.

We started by asking ChatGPT to come up with a ridiculous marketing campaign. It dutifully obliged, and a new line of high-end bottled water called "Caviar H2O" was born.

Now, all we needed was a swanky presentation to get buy-in and budget. This is where tome comes in.

We started off by using stable diffusion to create an image for the campaign. To be honest, what it came up with is pretty great. Credit where credit’s due.

We then chose a template in tome, before following the prompts to add the right messaging and imagery.

Our Take

It was incredibly easy to use—tome makes Powerpoint seem like a joke. Every time you drag in some text or an image, it works beautifully; it’s formatted perfectly and aligned to a tee.

HOWEVER, calling this an AI solution is a bit of a stretch. It does have text and image generative abilities (you can click on three dots in the corner of any text box and get it to write for you). But this is a very light touch. It wouldn’t be much harder (and, in fact, might be easier) to just copy and paste from ChatGPT.

So in terms of AI, it's not really bringing anything new to the party. Yet. That said, it is wonderful to use, and next time I have to prepare any kind of presentation, which thankfully isn’t that often, I would 100% use it.

Score

10/10 for slides. 5/10 for AI.

You talk. We Listen. And Reply!

Thanks for reading. If you have any suggestions or feedback–or just want somebody to talk to–reply to this email. We'd love to hear from you and promise to respond.

Until next week. Happy Marketing.

Tom and Charlie