The Battle for Ad Money: AI vs Human Content Creators

If you blog for ad revenue, you need to know why ad buyers are up in arms over AI generated content sites.

A recent MIT Technology Review blog focuses squarely on the fact that Google Ads are being placed on sites that are clearly comprised solely of poor-quality, AI generated content, which is directly against Google’s own ad policies.

FYI, this is a gated article, but it will let you have at least one or two articles for free.

Major Brands are Wasting Billions

The article asserts that 140 major brands are wasting $13 billion globally on ads that run on such made-for-advertising sites.

The article also states: “In a recent survey, the Association of National Advertisers found that 21% of ad impressions in their sample went to made-for-advertising sites.”

Google has publicly stated that they are not concerned about whether AI or a human generated the content. They care about quality and accuracy of content.

Yet, many of these sites have had no human editing or fact checking at all. 

The Threat of AI Generated Content

The article also asserts that: “The practice threatens to hasten the arrival of a glitchy, spammy internet that is overrun by AI-generated content, as well as wasting massive amounts of ad money.”

There are agencies, like NewsGuard, that monitor news sites, mainly for helping to curb the wildfire spread of misinformation. One site that was flagged by NewsGuard produced more than 1,200 AI-generated articles a day. 

The article states that NewsGuard, discovered “around 25 new AI-generated sites each week. It’s found 217 of them in 13 languages since it started tracking the phenomenon in April.”

How AI Generated Content is Detected

If you’re wondering how this AI content is detected, they use something that is no more sophisticated than scanning for the typical ChatGPT response of “Sorry, I cannot fulfill this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles …  As an AI language model, it is my responsibility to provide factual and trustworthy information.”

These scammy sites don’t have humans doing a copy/paste setup. This content is being auto generated directly into the site via an API connection to ChatGPT or some other AI writer.

And there are already plugins for WordPress that make this integration super easy to do.

Programmatic Ads Generate Revenue

Here’s the rub with the whole situation, and likely why Google will drag their feet on doing anything about it on their own:

“What is key to remember is that programmatic ads—and targeted ads more generally—are a fundamental enabler of the internet economy,” says Hodan Omaar, senior AI policy advisor at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC.

“If policymakers banned the use of these types of ad services, consumers would face a radically different internet: more ads that are less relevant, lower-quality online content and services, and more paywalls,” Omaar says. 

“Policy shouldn’t be focused on getting rid of programmatic ads altogether, but rather on how to ensure there are more robust mechanisms in place to catch the spread of misinformation, whether it be direct or indirect.”

How This Affects Bloggers

In my opinion, it will take the companies buying ads screaming at Google about the wasted ad dollars to see any real change come about with this issue.

And if that happens, I’m thinking that all ad agencies are going to start looking beyond Session numbers and start looking at the quality of your content.

And who knows what kind of tool they will use to do that, as I don’t think they will have humans reading it.

AI detectors are not any better at their job than AI writers are. 

And there are honest, human bloggers that don’t have a very polished writing style that may get flagged in all of this too.

Find New Revenue Models

I think it would be a good idea to check in with your ad agency and see what they think about all of this – and realize that they are going to give you an answer that keeps money in their pockets.

I think it would be an even better idea to move away from the blogging for ads revenue model and move toward creating a tribe and your own products, and to not rely solely on your blog’s traffic for income.