Fight Aging!

A blog-style site I've noticed at the edge of my vision of late is Immortal Humans. Based on a first glance, I relegated it to the spam blog / adsense content scraper bucket and proceeded to ignore it. It is sad but true that running ads (and especially Google-provided ads) on a site related to human longevity and aging is a very good indicator of worthlessness in this day and age. The worse end of the "anti-aging" marketplace has ensured that to be the case with their relentless transgressions of marketing norms and internet best practices. That whole culture of buyers and sellers is very much a foaming sea of fools and scum eagerly parting the gullible from their money - whilst simultaneously making it harder for folk like myself to advocate research into real longevity science. There is no love lost there, you can be sure; in a world where millions upon millions of dollars go towards educating people that "anti-aging" means makeup and fakery, it becomes that much harder to get a word in edgeways regarding the possibilities of actually extending the healthy human life span through science.

But back to the topic at hand. I noticed a press release from Immortal Humans today and went to take another look at the site based on it:

The publisher of ImmortalHumans.com, Andrej Lavrenc and his international team of research writers are on the constant look out for the latest developments in the field of stem cell research, bioscience, gerontology, current anti aging methods and drive towards human immortality. They are dedicated to documenting humankind’s quest for immortality and publishing related news as it happens. Life extension is no longer the fodder for science fiction novels due to considerable advances being made in the science of aging. Bioscience and technology experts have joined medical researchers and longevity authorities to investigate theories on slowing and even reversing the aging process. Amazing discoveries are being made in laboratories around the world and ImmortalHumans.com has those stories for you.

The content is low quality, but mostly a good deal closer to the sort of thing I write about than the sort of "anti-aging" nonsense you'll find on a spam blog. On the whole, Immortal Humans seems like the sort of evolution in topics relating to human longevity that we'd like to see: more on the actual longevity science and implications of aging research, and less on supplements, makeup, and magical thinking. As to the quality, well, I wasn't that great a writer when I started out, and now I've worked my way up to merely average.

So some free and unsolicited advice for the Immortal Humans folk from a fellow who makes no money writing online about longevity science and progress towards extended human longevity: if you want to be taken seriously, drop the optimized ads. If your primary driving goal in writing about something is to engineer clickthroughs and few-second view times, then you're not really writing about that topic at all, but instead simply piling up words aimed at algorithms rather than people. There's no talent or worth in that. The end result will be poor writing that reflects poorly on you, and ultimately makes everything you have to say suspect and ignored.

It's perfectly possible to make money via online content without falling into this trap - by writing things that are genuinely useful, insightful, or valuable. Take the high road in other words: write the content you want to write, write it well, and then figure out how to make money from it. Content first, monetization second.