Quick case study. Note, I am not selling anything, just trying to make people get a feel for what is possible when you do your own content or buy custom content. About 9 months ago, I started a blog in a niche category that was tapped, but poorly. Not even a niche that I really had an idea about. Started posting 2-3 times a day, on-site optimizing, doing little link exchanges with the competition, but the traffic was poor. 9 month and 690+ blog entries later, the site is at about 8k uniques a day, 40% of which is Google traffic from a
vast variety of keywords. Don't ask for the URL, for I will not share it.
Mind, this is the numbers for the leaderboard channel only, since it's pulling the most clicks.
I started three other blogs a few months back, each of which take roughly one hour of work per day each. They are starting to pick up similarly, but the numbers differ since they tackle different niches.
Sure, free content is nice to work with and easy to obtain, but it is just as easy to run your own ship, do your own writing. It does help tremendously with establishing a healthy, natural backlink structure, people are generally much more inclined to link to your site if they like your style of writing and the content you provide. I haven't spent a single breath on backlinks in months, and MSN reports 19,221 backlinks for this particular site. PR of 7, if anyone really cares.
My point, I do believe in custom content, the surfers love it and appreciate it, and my bank account likes it better than any auto-generated or free crap that's gotten me banned in various SEs before. Think of custom content as a long term investment. Speaking of adult, ultrawiredsex.com wasn't doing (and still does) as bloody well for years because he used dime-a-dozen content.