In the context of the World Wide Web, the term content farm is used to describe a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views^[1] as first exposed in the context of social spam.^[2]

Articles in content farms have been found to contain identical passages across several media sources, leading to questions about the sites placing search engine optimization goals over factual relevance.^[3]Proponents of the content farms claim that from a business perspective, traditional journalism is inefficient.^[1] Content farms often commission their writers' work based on analysis of search engine queries^[1] that proponents represent as "true market demand", a feature that traditional journalism lacks.^[1]