It's fair to say that Upworthy is an Internet sensation. The site has only been around for a year and a half, and it had 87 million unique visitors in November from a comparative handful of posts. Yet there's a vulnerability at the heart of its business model, as Jeff Bercovici explains:
Until 2011, entire public companies were built around gaming Google Inc.'s search algorithms, using networks of low-quality content to move themselves up the search rankings for popular terms. Then Google changed its algorithms, and those companies lost a huge chunk of their revenue overnight.
