What Is Content?

Before we answer that, let's make a horrible generalization. Ready? Here goes ...

With rare exception, the Web is about one thing: Making money.

I know, I know. "That's not true," you're thinking. "I go online for any number of reasons. To check e-mail, to play games, to get news."

And I believe you. But you've got to understand that very few online services come without a price. Even the free ones.

Many of the free services you're signed up for -- your free email, your free games, your free news, your free homepage -- share two common elements:

• They're all content or service driven.
• And they're all about making money off you.

Easy.

These free websites provide You with free content and free services, but they charge the Ad-Buying Community huge (and not-so-huge) fees to display ads to you while you use their free content and services.

So free sites don't take money directly from your pocket; they get money from you indirectly -- from advertisers who want to sell you stuff.

That's why your Geocities homepage has annoying pop-up windows all over it. That's why your Hotmail account has banner ads all over it.

These sites -- and thousands of others -- offer you quality content and services so you login, spend your time there and make (hopefully frequent) return visits. The more you use a given website, they more attractive the site becomes to advertisers, the more money the site can charge advertisers to push products in front of you.

Not that making money is a bad thing. Far from it. I love money. And I'm going to guess you do too, and that's why you're reading this.

Producing content for the Web is one way to make money online. If you're good at your trade, and persistent, and lucky, you can even make a career of it.

That said, what is content?

http://whatis.com defines good content as "an abundant amount of well-presented subject information organized for interesting and useful access in a hypertext structure."

That's a good place to start.

Content is information: news, facts, fiction, org charts, illustrations, photos, anything that communicates something to someone.

Of course, information without structure is meaningless; a random assortment of facts doesn't do anyone any good. So information needs to be organized, needs to be structured, in a way that makes sense to the viewer.

Picture a textbook. Textbooks contain information (and information is content). The information in the textbook is organized into sentences which are organized into paragraphs which are organized into pages which are further organized into chapters.

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