A content farm is a company that employs large numbers of writers to generate huge amounts of textual content specifically designed to satisfy the algorithms of web search engines like google, yahoo, bing etc. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue.

Content farms usually poach other media sources for information and ofter lead to copyright disputes. The articles are usually written by human beings but may not be written by a specialist in the area.Writers are often given commissions based on the analysis of search engine query results on their articles.

Although disputed hugely, proponents of the content farms claim that from a business perspective, traditional journalism is inefficient. Stories are chosen by a small group of people that frequently have similar experiences and outlooks. But content farms provide for "true market demand", a feature that traditional journalism lacks.

But the fact remains that content farms providing relatively low quality content as they maximize profit by producing just "good enough" rather than best possible quality articles. Authors are aware that the quality is not that good. Search engines see content farms as a problem, as they tend to bring the user to the less relevant and lower quality results of the search. Because of the attempt to deliver as much as possible and as cheaply as possible, content farms are called "McDonalds online".

In one of Google's promotional videos for search, the majority of the links available were reported to be produced at content farms.

Content farms contain huge number of articles. For instance, Demand Media will soon be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Big content farms are expensive resources, sold for many millions.