Over the last year or two, private label rights articles have become very popular to use as website content. A whole new industry of writers and distributors has blossomed, including membership sites aggregating and supplying regular blocks of articles to subscribers. Has this been a positive development for the internet?

There are those who see the emergence of private label rights articles as a further step towards degrading the quality of content available on the internet. Their view is that these articles make it easy for lazy website authors to pump out large volumes of template web pages, which may all be very similar. Others see these articles as a means to raise the overall quality of website content, by allowing webmasters to efficiently outsource the addition of well-written relevant articles to enhance the value of the information they offer. The truth probably lies somewhere between these positions.

When Google changed the rules for Adwords and allowed advertisers to set lower bids for the placement of advertisements on content websites, some of the attraction was taken from Adsense as a way to make money from websites. Perhaps too many websites were being produced with bland content that left visitors, led there by the search engines, with little choice: back out or click on an advertisement in search of some information more relevant to their needs. Now, to make searches more useful to users, the search engines are less likely to rank a poor quality website high enough to attract a lot of traffic. Moreover, website owners with average levels of traffic may find they need to supplement their reduced Adsense earnings with additional forms of website income. From a web surfer's point of view, the overall outcome appears to be a better quality of site rising to the top of the search engine lists.

Accordingly, the attraction of automatic website generation software using mass produced content appears to be declining, and old fashioned effort to produce websites with quality content, and more than just Adsense as a way to earn an income, seems to be returning to vogue. The popularity of private label rights articles has been maintained as their use declines in the former area, and rises in the latter.

Private label rights article sales are usually limited to a relatively small number of buyers, usually no more than around 200-350 for membership sites, and often under 50 for specialist suppliers. There are high volume mass-market exceptions, but there is market resistance to the large number of these articles in circulation. A high proportion of purchased articles are not used for a variety of reasons, from workload to relevance of the niche. Buyers also use the articles in different segments of the market. Add to these considerations the article editing that usually takes place to customize them for each website, and the outcome is little duplication of private label rights articles as seen in practice by any one user within the huge international internet market.

As internet marketing steadily matures as a business the long term place for outsourced private label rights articles as content in the building of quality websites seems assured.