Demand Media Is a Page View Generating Machine - And it's Working
In our recent post about the top 50 web properties in the U.S. according to comScore, we noted that Demand Media is on the rise - moving from #36 to #24 in the past 12 months. Demand Media owns a number of successful sites, including ehow.com, Pluck and eNom (the second or third-largest domain registrar in the world). The company also proclaims itself to be "the leader in social media solutions." Demand Media provides social media platforms to corporations and has a strong SEO business, creating niche website content tailored to search engines.
In short, Demand Media knows how to get page views.
Demand Media's original plan in 2006 was to buy up millions of domain names and stick content on them in order to monetize. Further into 2006 it added social media to the mix and since then the company has grown from strength to strength.
Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software. Demand Media has been heavily funded to carry out that mission, to the tune of $355 million. So yes, brute force - quantity of content + money/power - works more often than we'd like to think on the Web.
Demand Media was founded in 2006 by Shawn Colo and the former chairman of MySpace.com, Richard Rosenblatt. ReadWriteWeb first profiled Demand Media in November 2006, at which point we somewhat cynically concluded: "[the] next generation of new media it may be, but it all comes down to quantity in the end." Which is pretty much how it's panned out.
As of November 2008, Demand Media claimed to power 3 billion monthly social media interactions and was the #1 YouTube contributor. According to comScore, in July 2009 Demand Media had 31 million unique visitors.
Where Does the Content Come From?
Demand Media sources a lot of its content through freelancers, via its Demand Studios. The company has gotten content from over 10,000 people and uses a proprietary editorial system (apparently including "predictive algorithms") to publish it. As of May 2009, Demand Media claimed to have created more than 500,000 unique pieces of content - at a staggering rate of about 2,000 pieces of content per day! [Update: Demand Media contacted us to say that the total figure is now "nearly 1M pieces of content."] From YouTube alone, Demand Media garners 2 million impressions per day.
BusinessWeek explains the economics for contributors, but basically there is a set fee and percentage of ad revenues.
Conclusion: Demand Media Will Continue to Move up comScore's Charts
It's easy to be cynical about Demand Media - it creates truckloads of content very cheaply, uses social websites like YouTube to make it viral, and gets tons of page views as a result. But... it works. Demand Media earns more than $200 million in annual revenues, according to BusinessWeek.
Whether we like it or not, success on the Web mostly comes from quantity and not quality.
One does have to admire the system that Demand Media has built up to create content at little expense, make it viral and monetize it. The company's rise up the comScore Top 50 shows that this strategy is paying off big time.
We wouldn't be surprised to see Demand Media near the top 10 in comScore within a couple of years. As long as search engines like Google continue to rank niche, topical content highly - and we see absolutely no reason why they wouldn't - then Demand Media will continue to pump out thousands of articles a day to feed that page view generating machine.
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They really do nail down and market well to their new vertical markets. Demand Media has been very active with their campaigns to Social Media sources.
Exploding their companies and web properties onto Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter giving value from their sites and allowing others with niche interests to reciprocate and reverberate their content I believe has attributed to much of their success.
Great article as always.
"Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software."
Is "uninspired content" a polite way of calling this content spam?
Seems like they were able to get control of the content channel by snatching up so many domains. Any domain that's within eight characters (including a couple vowels) has long been acquired.
Perhaps I'm not fully understanding what they do so well. I would love to see a few case studies included to demonstrate how effective they can be.
We were able to attend the Pluck on Demand presentation by Richard Rosenblatt at last year’s web 2.0 summit. It was very impressive and it’s no surprise that they are doing so well. Keep up to good work!
MisterZafarnia, I wouldn't go as far as calling it spam - it's often very useful, practical content. I gave an example in my post back in 2006:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/demand_media.php
It's usually very bland content and contributes little that's *new* to the Web. But many pro blogs operate the same way. It's a strategy that can be very successful, with luck and/or (as I mentioned in this post) brute force.
This article leads me to the question I always have.... What will the next innovation be that will enable searchers to filter the good information from the stupid information?
The poor quality content is only multiplying. Check out the writing jobs posted on any given day on Elance. The majority of them are for garbage "content. Article spinning, rewrite my two articles 20 times, blah, blah, blah.
I'm a former MSM reporter who truly believes that people want and need information and that quality information matters. I think good writing is often a plus, but good information is usually more important.
Just wondering if Google or Bing is working on an algorithm that will sniff out and ignore the garbage. Because, as you point out, Digital Media has clearly learned how to make a buck on the fact that the search engines can't tell the difference between an article that took a professional hours to write and provides relevant and important information and something that a spinner put together in a few minutes.
Maybe I should stop griping and learn how to turn out garbage, but gosh I hate to do it.
Susannah
We agree there are alot of garbage out there and it hurts to have to be a users and try to sniff through all of that in order to get to the worthy content that we are looking for. We are finding this to be very true. We hope that companies continue to work on creating valuable content and not crap. People do read the stuff on the web right ?
Demand Media Takes Minority Stake in Coveritlive; Will Use it With Pluck http://www.trigeia.com/article.php?id=64375
Richard,
A few things:
-First they are the number two registar in the world to dotandco and webhosting.info http://www.dotandco.net/ressources/icann_registrars/details/position.en
-Demand Media only has 30 million page views because it has a bunch of schill registrars it setup to "taste" domains and keep ones with decent type in traffic, they also hoard valuable domain drops that have traffic.
If you call that success then sure
Thanks for the data points John.
It doesn't matter what *I* call it, the fact of the matter is it pulls massive page views and advertising revenue.
@Richard MacManus,
Thanks for the follow-up. Your point is well0taken; it seems like they've done the equivalent of buying the land, paving the highway, setting the landscape and dropping billboards everywhere along the way. Early bird gets the worm I guess.
I'm still not convinced this isn't at least partially spam. It sort of reminds me of these cruddy sites that show up, like when you mistype a URL,
ie: http://readwwriteweb.com/ - two w's :)
While Domain Tasting is no longer available, it would be interesting to see the break down between expired and parked domains and actual sites.
There is no future in this sort of crap content. It's a pump and dump company.
It's content that people are searching for and it's created by qualified people. Tons of qualified people out their supplementing their incomes through the studio. The content is vetted and can be created cheaply and at scale. Big news sites are also publishing Demand content. Great content, great Social Media tools and sticky applications!!
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The search engines are only getting smarter, and their goals are aligned with everyday users trying to find good quality, useful content and increasingly so. This model of content creation is just not sustainable and will gradually turn users, and indeed the search engines off.
Has anyone here actually seen the stuff on eHOW? Sure, this stuff generates a whole load of page views and quick departures - but under the hood, it is nothing but a whole load of spam. These days I simply ignore the ehow links in my search results, and for a reason - their stuff is typically written by some out of work actor or fake writer they try to pass off as an expert, who have been given a list of keywords and a highly standardized step 1 to step 10 template to write pages and pages of search engine optimized spam that's deceptive and completely useless. I'll pass thank you.
While it can be considered spam articles, the content is reviewed. Sadly, it is often reviewed on as proper keyword density.
I think caffeine ( w/ google) will be changing their relevancy, however not for a long,long time.
One thing I tend to forget is that "Internet Users" in general are not as savvy as we are. We can recognize crap content from afar- normal users don't see it until much later, which equals page views.
"...who have been given a list of keywords and a highly standardized step 1 to step 10 template to write pages and pages of search engine optimized spam..."
This statement is completely and utterly false. I am a writer for Demand Studios and we are never given a list of keywords, or a step by step template from which to write. We are supplied with "titles," and we must write to the title, supplying relevant and useful information which is then reviewed by a professional copy editor before publication. This brings me to my next point...
"Sadly, it is often reviewed on as proper keyword density."
This is another untrue statement. The articles are never reviewed on keyword density. Demand is interested in quality content, not keyword stuffed spam. Keywords play no part in content creation for Demand Studios. Writers create content on a variety of topics, and each must be helpful, well-written and informative. An article will be denied for publication if it doesn't meet the very high quality standards of Demand Studios' copy editors. That's why they get the page views, because the content is relevant and not stuffed with keywords. Google notices and appreciates this.
"Has anyone here actually seen the stuff on eHOW?"
EHow also accepts contributions from anyone with the ability to type and submit an article. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but the useless "garbage" articles on eHow are not written by Demand Studios content providers. (And there is an ongoing effort on the site to clean these out.) They are unedited and submitted by the your average Joe. I'm sure eHow rakes in the cash from these submissions, but they are not representative of a Demand Studios writer's work.
This is just an FYI to clear up some misinformation by a very happy content producer working with Demand Studios. :)
It's a great post.thanks for sharing
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eHow accepts articles from your average Joe and also gets content FROM Demand Media. I believe the DM writers are credited as a "contributing writer".
We do extensive research to make sure all of our articles are factually accurate - please don't lump us with the other writers on eHow. We go through an extremely difficult process to get them approved, and keyword density isn't a part of it. Don't make accusations about Demand Media when you don't even know the first thing about it.
For the past three weeks, ehow has not been crediting their new writers for money earned. They also have serious technical bugs that go unsolved (and seemingly ignored) for weeks at a time. Looks like Demand Studios may be setting ehow up for a new model--like making small, up-front payments to writers (ala Demand Studios) instead of the ongoing residuals writers signed up for. Lack of money from the parent company wouldn't seem to be the problem, so what else explains the continuing chaos at ehow?
I agree with other DS writers here, be careful lumping us in with the content spinners and spammers. We were all hired by DS (yes with an actual resume, writing samples, and a writing test)to write for them. Furthermore each writer gains access to only some of the titles available to write to based on their previous writing, skills, and areas of interest and expertise. We often write for other websites too, but those who write for Demand Studios were hand picked from applicants and all our work is screened by a Copy Editor for grammar as well as fact checking and stolen content. We include References on every article as well.
I'm sorry, but I don't quite get it.
they pay people to write content to put in these domains they bought.
isn't that exactly what every site is doing?
was is the different from RWW, for example? only the quantity?
@Layla. 100% agree. Demand is a prime example of a company which regurgitates worthless content and clogs up the Internet. Please, Google, figure this out and kill the traffic to this content spam.
One thing I tend to forget is that "Internet Users" in general are not as savvy as we are. We can recognize crap content from afar- normal users don't see it until much later, which equals page views.
I will remember your blog place. Because I love you more ideas.
After this I will read all your posts thankful.
Locking up tons of unused addresses filling them with useless ads and links is definitely spam. This makes it harder for all of us to find available site names and quality content.
Hopefully, prices for registering domains will go up in the future. Also Google is getting better and better in sorting out this kind of crap.
They are one google algo change away from going broke!
Great article.
Whatever opinion one may have to this, the statistics are talking louder. The page-view numbers are impressive and it is similar to you asking a friend for help. You also wont get the perfect expert-advice. But it is free and might help you get a bit further with your problem or give you a new direction to think.
User generated content is the way to go :-)