When I worked for a content marketing agency 1, we added Shutterstock photos to our lightly rewritten “news” articles. Some were generic people shots, but a big chunk were these “magic cloud button” ones. I always wondered what the button would do:

  • Open a Confluence Cloud 2 page?
  • Run Speedtest.net?
  • Open Dropbox or Google Drive?

I got so used to writing this “cloudy” content 3 that I could churn it out without even thinking—which was probably the point of my training there. Implicit in calling anything “content” is thinking that it should be, if not literally made by a machine, then produced with the speed and unsentimentality of one.

I wrote a variant of the following hundreds of times

Cloud computing solutions let small and medium sized businesses 4 access pooled compute, storage, and networking resources over an IP network. Compared to on-premises IT infrastructure, cloud computing is more cost-effective and scalable.5

I may as well have had a TextExpander (which I still used for my personal projects at the time) entry for that. I was becoming a machine writing for other machines.

Now that type of writing is post-cliché—commoditized even more by ChatGPT et al. Maybe the magic cloud button was always meant to be a one-click solution to creating some clickable content.

  1. Some would use the more derisive terms “content mill” or “content farm.” ↩︎

  2. What an awful product, worse than its on-prem/server version in almost every way. ↩︎

  3. This word classifies whatever’s being created as basically interchangeable with anything else—it’s there to fill up the container (a Google SERP page in this case) and do nothing else. ↩︎

  4. All content is nominally aimed at SMBs. ↩︎

  5. Not always true, because cloud services are perpetual subscriptions. ↩︎