I’ve written a lot on here about the journalism machine I’ve been building. Early this month I completed the prototype, and tested out the first article generated by machine on Reddit.

The post got 29 upvotes, 16 comments, and generated about 180 visits (on a sub-reddit of about 6,000 users). Topping a sub-reddit with a machine-generated article is great. It confirmed my thinking on dominating niches. The rest of the data wasn’t so good though. The average session duration was 27 seconds. A number of the comments were not pleased with the relevence of the list, despite the relevent title. More importantly, I kept struggling with the knowledge that writing quality articles quickly is only half the battle. Getting them consistent, quality traffic isn’t some easy afterthought.

So, despite having a perfectly functional prototype, I’m starting from scratch. I’m changing my strategy from almost fully autonamous content generation, to speedy quality human content generation. I want to remove the structuring/editing needs from writing my most popular types of blog post, while still writing the post by hand (to retain that human, relevent touch the prototype pieces were missing).

I am also going to be launching these new articles on The App Store Chronicle, where a long-developed Search reputation makes it much easier to top a SERP and get lasting traffic. The App Store Chronicle is consistently bringing in $40-50 in profit a month from the articles I wrote from 2011-2015, but I believe that with more, more search-ready articles, TASC can bring in 10x that, at least.

The articles that have brought TASC traffic consistently for years at a time have been the popular unanswered questions of the internet. These are questions too small for Engadget or Recode to write an article about, that still have 1-2000 people looking for answers in a month.

For example, today I wrote an article on TASC about Tinder’s recent logo change. Within minutes, this article was ranking high on the first page of Google, and bringing in traffic.

Writing about interface changes for popular apps always bring in a fair amount of traffic. Sometimes, they bring in a lot of traffic.

Every time I write one of these posts though, it takes time to structure and edit it. I have to think “How do I go about writing this change up?” Being able to select “interface change”, fill in a few blanks, and have a great article would allow me to save enough time to write 10x the articles. With 10x the articles, I have 10x the chance of hitting that big winner that sends 20,000 readers.

I’ll end this ramble here, but you get the idea.