The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media
Two companies that produce massive quantities of new content every day, Answers.com and Demand Media, are rapidly moving up the list of top U.S. web properties, as measured by comScore. Answers.com has risen from #26 to #13 in just two months, and Demand Media has risen from #24 to #15 in the same time period. Answers.com has nearly 38 million pages of content on the Web so far; Demand Media produces 2,000 4,000 new pieces of content a day.
Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web? Will it lead to the same uniformity and lowest common denominator content that afflicts the television industry?
In this post we take a closer look at how Answers.com is becoming so successful - and what this may mean for the Web. In a follow-up post, we will dive deeper into Demand Media's model, based on an interview I conducted with several Demand Media executives (including founder Richard Rosenblatt) at the Web 2.0 Summit in September.
Answers.com Rolling in Page Views, Money
Answers.com, which we reviewed in August, garnered 56.4 Million monthly unique visitors in the United States in September (83M worldwide). For context, that puts it on a similar level as CBS Interactive (#12 with 58M uniques in U.S.) and Apple (#11 with 60M). Demand Media, which we also reviewed in August, was close behind with 52.5M uniques in September.
Answers.com announced its Q3 2009 financial results today. It made $4.99 million in revenue in that quarter, including $1.9M in September alone. The Q3 09 result was an increase of 40% compared to $3.56 million in Q3 2008. Most of the 09 revenues were from WikiAnswers, which reported $3.42 million in Q3 2009 - an increase of 75% compared to $1.96 million in Q3 2008.
WikiAnswers is the main reason for Answers.com's popularity. It is a Q&A site driven by user-generated content. And it's growing fast. Bob Rosenschein, Founder, Chairman & CEO of Answers.com, left a comment on our earlier post saying that "the growth in our traffic is almost entirely from our WikiAnswers site."
In September, WikiAnswers garnered 46.3 million U.S. unique visitors and ReferenceAnswers 21.4 million U.S. unique visitors (note there is some crossover between the two sites, hence those numbers are greater than the unduplicated total of 56.4M).
Low-Cost Content Production On A Massive Scale
There are two interesting aspects to the success of Answers.com. Firstly, it has a huge number of pages on the Web now: 38 million as of today. Much of that is user-generated content, so very low cost.
Secondly, Answers.com's page view and financial success is almost entirely created off the back of Google. Indeed, Answers.com announced recently that it has renewed its Google Services Agreement - extending its access to Google AdSense for two more years. Bob Rosenschein, CEO of Answers.com, is quoted as saying that "we earn the vast majority of our ad revenue from Google's sponsored links."
Now consider the implications of this for the future of content on the Web. The recent rapid ascensions of Answers.com and Demand Media can only really lead to one conclusion: to succeed in the content business on the Web, you should pump out hundreds of pages of content every day - preferably thousands.
Now, this is nothing new. We've known for a long time that blog success is more easily gained (gamed?) by producing far more posts per day than any one person can read. This has led to many professional blogs competing with each other on how many posts they can put up every day - usually accompanied by a slide in quality.
As well as producing as much content as possible, Answers.com and Demand Media also have a low cost structure in common with blogs. But they are taking the 'quantity rules' approach to a whole new level. This is low-cost content production done on a huge scale.
Just how much content do these two sites have on the Web? There's an easy way to find out: search Google. Here is the amount of content each has, along with some other sites for comparison:
- wikipedia.org: 56,000,000
- answers.com: 37,700,000 (of which wiki.answers.com accounts for 34,100,000)
- nytimes.com: 13,200,000
- washingtonpost.com: 12,500,000
- ehow.com: 4,850,000 (this is Demand Media's lead site)
- huffingtonpost.com: 4,740,000
- mashable.com: 210,000
- techcrunch.com: 124,000
- readwriteweb.com: 37,700
Answers.com has nearly 38 million pages of content on the Web. Much of it is discovered via Google; and monetized via Google. Wikipedia still has more content, but it is a non-profit world encyclopedia. Answers.com is a commercial company, out to make money.
Demand Media is well behind Answers.com (and Wikipedia), but there's reason to believe it will ramp up fast. In August the company told us that it produces 2,000 pieces of content per day, across its network of sites [Update, 7 Nov 09: it's now 4,000, Demand Media told us]. It also has a slick content production 'studio' system, which we will explore in our next post.
Interesting to note that Huffington Post is really the closest the blog world has to a player in this 'mega content' space - but then most of the site's content comes from aggregating it from other sites. Huffington Post has been criticized by the New York Times in particular for this practice.
Note that the New York Times and the Washington Post clearly both have a lot of content too - but they also have a lot of well-paid staff. Answers.com and Demand Media are producing content at a fraction of the price that the NYT and the WP pay for it.
The Age of Mega Content Sites - Where Is This Headed?
On the Web, traditionally success has been measured by page views. This isn't always the case - there's certainly a place for quality over quantity, a philosophy which we at ReadWriteWeb firmly believe in! But by and large, big page views usually means big revenue... or at least the promise of it (e.g. in Facebook's case).
Both Answers.com and Demand Media are onto a good thing. They have different approaches - Answers.com is largely user-generated content combined with Wikipedia and other sources; Demand Media has created a low-cost content factory, by employing thousands of freelancers.
Google is largely keeping both companies in business - it is the source of most of their traffic (because a lot of it is reference or resource content) and certainly in Answers.com's case it provides the bulk of its revenue.
I can't help but think that the rapid rise of these two companies may be bad news for the Web. If a small number of companies come to dominate a content market, usually blandness and lowest common denominator fare follows. The network television and radio markets in almost any country in the world are evidence of that. Likewise, if you search Google for a reference article and the first page of results is littered with Answers.com and Demand Media articles, is that crowding out the real topic experts?
Are these mega content sites a good or bad thing for the Web? Is quality taking too much of a back seat to quantity? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Hi :-)Richard,
so Content is still King.
It's looks so easy, just let users generate lot of content and make sure that this content is correct SEO optimized, why it's anyway so difficult ...
Thank's for the interesting post.
with kind regards
Ortwin Oberhauser
feel free to follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/Oberhauser
@Oberhauser
Great article. Thank you. My feeling is that if google continues down this path they will only have themselves to blame when they go from A- student to that kid that once showed so much promise. This is certainly google's tough challenge, continue to push trash, pick up the pennies and risk becoming irrelevant or ..?
These sites are pretty much the end stage of Google SEO evolution. Lots of small time folks were doing similar article based SEO operations and over time a couple have grown up to dominate the search results. They've carefully aligned themselves with Google's algorithm for ranking content. They will probably continue to evolve and dominate as long as Google continues to use it's ranking algorithm or until a new search engine takes over.
It echos the Soap Opera evolution where daytime TV dramas were sponsored by household goods companies. The model was so simple that sales revenue was ploughed back into more advertising in a virutous circle. Enventually one or two companies ended up dominating the space and carried on happily for years (and still do).
To these guys fooling Google is so easy it's like taking candy from a baby.
Google, get your act together, or else...
I think it's good for the semantic capabilities of the future applications. More data, more knowledge. What I could get from Tim Armstrong's Web 2.0 Summit speech, AOL is also entering this space with a different model. True. Producers and social media publishing platforms are the hot players of this trend as of now; the next step will be semantic processing of that bulk.
First of all great article, thanks for it...
I will add one thing. I mean there is a different between significance and insignificance content. Therefore you have to decide which should be more important: many many many sites or just a few sites (maybe 10 per day). I mean the information should be the important thing not just an amount of sites.
But one realisation could be:
"to succeed in the content business on the Web, you should pump out hundreds of pages of content every day"
Impossible for just one/two person/s.
Well, what kind of content does Answers.com produce? They just taken Wikipedia, added a few dictionaries, and ... POOF! Traffic!
From my experience of visiting some of these companies web pages, many of them are very poor in the information they give on a topic, and frequently is actually wrong.
If they were to be given too much prominence in Google's results then it would certainly turn me away from Google.
Whilst they have their place, I agree that their rapid rise and model is not in the best interests of web users.
Richard, I'd like to hear more about how you used Google to estimate the size of these content sites. I've recently done a similar analysis - estimating the size of these sites and then dividing that number by competitive traffic data from Compete.com to come up with an interesting stat CVPP (Compete Visits per Page of Content). My size estimates are considerably lower than yours... are you effectively isolating true content pages (such as articles) from other pages that the site has in the Google index (e.g. print view pages, user profile pages, etc.)? True content pages are a true measure of size for a publisher, not counting pages that can be programmatically generated and therefore take up space in Google's index.
My technique was to Google a phrase that only exists on a content detail page for that site, restricted by domain. E.g. one site's article template might have a phrase like "flag article:" that only exists on that kind of page in the site. Then I would google "Flag Article:" site:ehow.com. Then I would do a separate query for video pages. And each site I looked at is different. Anyways, this technique brings ehow in more around 780,000 not 5 million pieces of content. I double checked this technique against sites I actually know the amount of articles, and it was the only way I could even get close to the real number.
For my analysis and commentary of Demand, link's here: http://bit.ly/24znVF
You forgot Associated Content. Bigger than both and better technical foundation. First player in this space. Funded by CEO of AOL.
It seems that Google favors Q&A which makes sense since most people go to Google with a question and are looking for an answer. I'm the co-founder of YouSaidIt, Social Q&A. Our approach is white label, niche Q&A sites that integrate with your web site. The SEO is superb but so are the answers, because it's not based on the lowest common denominator but instead on local expertise.
I'm obviously biased, but I think that as user generated content evolves into social content (i.e. content from your community) it will only get more useful and Google will do well to make sure it is on top of that content.
@yousaidit
These sites are a scourge. A wiki without the editorial dedication of wikipedia is spam central. A how-to site with intern writers is FUD central. Thank you Google for ruining the internet.
It's basically following the porn industry model. Clicks are all that matters - the content can stink. Forums are an exception. Though often difficult to search within, the content in forums is at least genuine (for the most part).
Which leaves the question, who actually uses the search results from Google (versus just checking their link popularity and etc) and how do they use the information which comes up in the search? Myself, I do use Google and other engines to find information for the sake of finding information. However, from past experience I ignore any links spit out to sites like Answers, Yahoo Answers, and etc. The information on these sites is not useful. Often it is fluff - stuff that is obvious to anyone or just repeating the same stuff I could find anywhere. So, I think these kind of content spewing sites will have their day as so many others have before them. I can't see them being around for the long haul. Which suites them as they will have made their money and sold off to someone else.
On Mahalo Answers, humans curate the Questions, Answers AND the Comments. Thus, there is a continual culling of 'junk' data. 'How much wood can a woodchuck chuck?' is not a question, therefore it is jettisoned. ('Who is Paris Hilton dating?' -- while banal -- is actually a legit question, so it stays).
However, by deleting bad data via curation, Mahalo gives up page generation -- and traffic -- in this process. You're right, Richard: at the moment, Google rewards huge volumes of junk over small volumes of better content.
It would be better for the web if Google somehow changed this. But despite claims of semantic this and spiritual machines that, computers are just plain bad at understanding things. And I doubt they will get better any time soon. Von Neumann machines simply cannot grok meaning like people can. And that is probably what is at the heart of this: it's not realistically possible for Google to curate the meaning of these pages -- there is no true defense, except for humans.
Unless Google changes how it ranks I can see that the big-boys will control the first 1-3 pages of search results.
We can all complain about this but at the end of the day the mainstream community does not think much and will click on what is presented to them.
Personally I heard about RWW from word of mouth and now I am here its the only techie site I bother to go to. Mashable seems to produce "Candyfloss" - looks great from a far but when you look deeper (eg read the article) it lacks value. They seem to want to vomit out as many articles per day as they can where RWW produces quality articles. For that I always tell everyone interested in tech to come here and avoid the candy floss makers.
Nice post Richard. Here's a post I wrote on the same subject a few days ago called "Go Big, Go Horizontal":
http://www.sexywidget.com/my_weblog/2009/10/go-big-go-horizontal.html
Great article highlighting the success of quantity-focused sites on the web at the moment. I'd like to suggest however (as CEO of http://www.suite101.com ), that search engines are always out to find the best quality content. Traditional media simply haven't figured out yet how to identify, target and write for the interest of Search audiences. Without professional competition and people often desperate just to find anything on what they search for, it's easy to generate traffic quickly with a quantity or even a simple aggregation focus. This success will be short-lived as quality sites catch up. The success of fully quality-focused sites (such as those written solely by professionals and experts) that embrace Search audiences shows that ultimately the lowest common denominator does not win. The best article wins. And if you can deliver that by the hundreds or thousands -- all the better! People want to read quality, and quality writers want to earn fair compensation. Quantity-only plays are on a different track.
They make over 5$ eCPM?? Impressive.
http://ir.answers.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=421728
RPM
WikiAnswers $5.87
ReferenceAnswers $5.89
Mass production of content won't transform the Internet into a mass media. Just the opposite.
The success of WikiAnswers and eHow is based on long-tail searches. For example, someone might search for "2001 Land Rover replace thermostat" and get "How do you replace the thermostat on a 2001 Land Rover 75?". The answer on WikiAnswers might not be very good (yet), but that doesn't mean Google should send the person to a high-quality article on Land Rovers or thermostats.
There's no crowding out going on here. Someday if someone produces a high-quality article on replacing thermostats on 2001 Land Rovers, it will jump to the top of the search results. Google does their job amazingly well.
Chris Whitten
Creator of WikiAnswers, now developing WikiTree.com
nice article. my startup is in this general boat as well - http://www.ranker.com - though we are taking a different approach. these are certainly interesting times and this shift is happening fast, way too fast for "old media" to even remotely catch up. will be interesting to look back in 5 years - we will indeed see colossal amounts of uninformed noise, but in parallel there is a lot of innovation going on around intelligent filters to rise the quality to the top.
It seems like technologically speaking, SEO is a fact of life and here to stay. One way to level the playing field would be transparency, rather than the top secret algorithms of google, yahoo and bing. If the secret SEO techniques are no longer secret, the SEO sites would no longer have competitive advantage.
Churning out millions of pages of cheap content may make Answers.com good money for now, but if a couple of companies begin to dominate Google search results with poor-quality content of little use to the searcher, then over time the wise searchers will search elsewhere.
If Google perceives an erosion, I suspect Google will adjust its technology accordingly. It's already easy enough to add the Boolean expression NOT (as in NOT from answers.com).
If I were an investor in these operations, I'd be pretty uncomfortable with their reliance on Google-as-revenue-engine.
Also note Answers still was in the red as of the end of the last quarter.
And Answers.com is now part of Demand Media. Enough said.
oops, I was wrong, sorry. Demand now owns Answerbag.com. Same thing, different name.
Who are the other players in this field that provide this long tail content to publishers (for a fee)? The only players I know are Associated Content and Demand Media. Anyone else?