Content is king. You have probably heard that a million times but it's true. That is why writing articles is one of the most utilized Internet marketing media today. It’s also one of the most abused marketing methods. The online advertising craze began picking up with the introduction of FFA (Free For ALL) sites. These sites allowed you to submit your link or ad, which slowly rotated off the page as new links were submitted. Once this method of advertising became known, scores of people rushed to FFA sites and began submitting their ads. Programmers invented ways to automate the process of submitting links to hundreds of sites within seconds, causing it to become an ineffective marketing option because of the scores of people who began using this system. Links would rotate off the page within seconds and this eventually led to the downfall and popularity of them. Another marketing method, which quickly became useless, was banner advertising and exchanges. People covered their sites with banners, learned how to cheat exchanges and surfers began to train their eyes to ignore them completely. As a result, image advertising also became ineffective. Automated page creation was also a problem as thousands of people began to create gateway pages as a means to draw in the search engines with multiple pages stuffed with keywords to increase their site’s page rank. Gateway page generators automated the process of building these pages and soon they sprang up all over the net. Eventually this fad also became useless due to abuse as well as the introduction of smarter search engine spiders. The latest moneymaking craze is Google Adwords. Once pay-per-click advertising grew in popularity, webmasters discovered how easy it was to earn income by stuffing their sites with useless content in order to profit from textual advertising. The automation monster appeared again making it fairly easy to submit articles to hundreds of content sites by merely clicking a few buttons. In steps PLR membership sites. PLR articles, also known as Private Label Rights articles or public domain articles, provide people who are too lazy to write their own content with a means to get links back to their site and hopefully sell some of their products in the process. Search engines have begun penalizing web sites for duplicate content. In response, new programs are being created which randomize paragraphs and change words within an article to make them unique enough to bypass the duplicate content filters. So now we have automated article creation? Publishers are beginning to recognize the different methods of article abuse and it’s becoming more difficult to get articles approved. As editors begin tiring of trying to keep up with the massive influx of articles that are obviously written for the sole purpose of gaining link popularity or to advertise affiliate links, we will see more article directories shut down. Is automation really the monster here? I think not! Automated article submission is a great tool for submitting articles to a large number of sites providing it is used properly. So what’s the problem? Greed and laziness – plain and simple. Automation allows writers to submit their articles to many sites quickly and easily, freeing up more time to write original content. The problem comes from those who are always looking for a shortcut to making money, rather than to work for it. Article marketing abuse will soon reach its peak just as FFA sites, banner advertising and gateway pages did. Eventually we will look at private label articles as another passing trend and online publishers will be able to provide their visitors with quality content once again. For now, we can only wait until those hoping to get rich quick find another marketing option to automate and abuse.