Is there SEO benefit of automated content through Narrative Science or Automated Insights?

[barberm]

I'm considering working with a group like Narrative Science or Automated Insights to create content for 10k cities around the country. Each article they would create (3-5 per city) would be completely original, based on data we either own or license, written to our editorial tone, voice and direction, and consist of 300-500 words per page.

If you are familiar with these groups, you'll know that it is not spun content or spammy crap that we know Google kills off in droves. It will be well written, accurate, articulate original content on topics like health, demographics, population growth, schools and education and weather pertaining to a city or metro area.

My question - assuming the answer is actually known - is how well (or if) this content will perform in Google. It is a significant investment for my group (well into size figures) and we don't want to take this decision lightly. We are looking to challenge sites like city-data.org and bestplaces.net, who largely just regurgitate aggregated data.

[MichaelC-15022]

It's going to come down to just a couple of things:

1. How well the content is written--what's the reading grade level score, are there grammatical errors, etc.
2. How close the content comes to existing content on the web.

I'm not familiar with these two companies, but from what you say, it sounds like #1 isn't going to be an issue.  And most likely #2 won't be a problem either--even though realistically they're going to be looking up the raw data from somewhere (Wikipedia!) and doing their best to completely rewrite it....and that's always a challenge.

But the reason I don't think #2 is honestly going to be a problem is because right now, Google doesn't seem to be very good at spotting near duplicate content with even just light edits.  Or even WITHOUT edits, just with other content on the page.  As an example, search for this phrase (including the quotes) in Google (it's taken straight from Freebase, i.e. Wikipedia's back door):

"The local people are mainly Maasai, but people from other parts of the country have settled there"

Google finds and displays 96 YES NINETY-SIX pages before chopping it off and leaving it to the supplementals.

Will this go on forever?  Of course not, Google is undoubtedly working at trying to handle detection of this kind of thing.  Certainly it isn't in Google's quality interests to list 96 pages all that suck the description of something straight out of Freebase.  But, this paints a picture of where they are today in doing that....and that tells us that they're a long ways from taking a run at content that you've hand-rewritten from other sources....even if it's a light rewrite.