farm out

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unpakwon

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What does "farm out" mean in the following context? And would you please paraphrase the sentence in red more easily? It's so confusing. And what does "eyeballs" refer to? I know its literal meaning.

Many searches in Google throw up a lot of results from sites such as ehow.com and about.com which farm out cheap content creation aimed directly at optimizing for Google's algorithm. The content is often weak, and is unlikely to engage passionate fans who can be moved along the demand curve to where they will choose to spend lots of money on things they really value. Instead, this is a volume game, arbitraging getting cheap traffic from gaming Google's algorithm to gain sufficient eyeballs to build a display advertising business.

Thank you.
 

Barb_D

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"eyeballs" means, in this context, the number of people who visit the page. It's a synecdoche.

The point of the piece is that some of these sites get many, many visits. They do this, even though the content is bad, because they have figured out how to show up high on hits created by Google searches. Because they have so many visits, they can charge high rates for their ads. (The logic is, "A lot of people come here, so you should pay well to be seen by that many people.") However, it's a poor use of advertisers' money to advertise there, because the poor quality of the content won't keep the visitors on the site for long or engage their interest.
 
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