TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Daniel Roth’s fascinating and disturbing look at how one company finds new writing and video topics and commissions them:

Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.

If that doesn’t scare you — a world where creative content is decided by an algorithm and done for the lowest possible price — I don’t know what will.