The Most Useless High-Paying Job

[MkRezz]

I recently attended an SEO conference and had a chat with a pretty sharp speaker. He told me this funny story about how his company has an entire department dedicated to predicting major world events. Based on those predictions, they publish articles across their network of sites in advance, with analysis and commentary on events that haven’t even happened yet. Apparently, the department has a few employees earning around $3,500 a month on average. Maybe they’ve found a clever way to monetize it, but from the way he described it, it honestly sounded more like management’s pet project than a serious business strategy

 

[Deadite]

So many talented people trying to find a job, meanwhile scammers and grifters always find a way to make money doing something completely useless for the world, many "businesses" are making profits without providing any real value

 

[Galilei]

it's old tactic, some big news sites do it all the time

 

[Stavro]

I'd call that proactive, not useless.

When people start looking for 2030 Olympic travel guides for lesser-known cities, which site would they trust? The one that didn't exist a week before the opening ceremony, or the one that was built in 2020 and has effectively served as the unofficial tourism bureau for that city for nearly a decade?

This is just the same principle applied to less predictable events.

 

[MkRezz]

I'd call that proactive, not useless.

When people start looking for 2030 Olympic travel guides for lesser-known cities, which site would they trust? The one that didn't exist a week before the opening ceremony, or the one that was built in 2020 and has effectively served as the unofficial tourism bureau for that city for nearly a decade?

This is just the same principle applied to less predictable events.

I generally agree. I just don’t really understand the logic behind paying such a high salary, since the company hired regular, albeit good, copywriters for the job. For companies in my country, $3,500 per month is considered a pretty high salary. Even the average salary for a senior seo specialist here is around $2,500 a month

 

[Stavro]

Good copywriters should be paid that much.

Their job isn't 'pump out 50 articles a week about keywords X, Y, and Z'. Their job is to research current events and predict what could become relevant five years from now.

You're only seeing the finished articles, not the hundreds of hours of research behind them.

 

[ahamedmilon]

Honestly, some corporate middle-management roles feel pretty useless compared to what they get paid! They just forward emails all day long.

 

[Brick_Wolf889]

I think what you describe as being uselles is pretty clever they predict the next trends and build sites around them. By the time the trend catch them they already ranked and will monetize those sites much better than someone who try to catch the trend after it happen. With enternet the trends come and go much faster so you need to be prepared to have any chance