Online, everybody and their dog is a publisher. Some 700 million retailers, brand owners, corporate bloggers, media, and private users who want to reach online users as friends or as customers publish digital content. The resulting content explosion creates an intense competition for online visibility. In their quest to be visible on line, publishers have no choice but to produce more and more spam-like content optimized to meet the ranking criteria of leading traffic gateways: the few traffic drivers that dominate their category such as Google, Bing, the AppStore, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Amazon. This creates a rampant content inflation, a massive input of low-value-added content that worsens the content explosion. Optimized content can easily displace, and could even ultimately outgrow original content. I show concrete examples of how pervasive ranking-optimized content is and how difficult it is to draw the line between optimization and straightforward spam. On the contrary, optimization blends in. We must learn to live with it – which for businesses means having a real content strategy. Agenda Why publishers are force to (sort of) spam How they go about it - Publish or perish - Content farming - Too frequent updates - Social Hyperactivity - Spinning Unique Content - Automated Content The resulting content inflation Learning to live with it