Working for the Web's Big Content Machine

I'm hardly qualified to dash off authoritative articles on the theological bona fides of African critters. But one recent evening, I made $15 for writing tips on hard-disc data recovery, another $15 for telling people how to repair burnt carpet and $7.50 for teasing out the answer to that most pressing of questions: Is a giraffe sacred?

The reason for my nighttime writing adventure was to see what life is like on a massive content farm. I was working for Demand Media, the content-provider start-up that has quickly become the Web's least understood and most vilified juggernaut. The company has come up with a ruthlessly efficient way to churn out stories it knows will be profitable online. The topics may seem bizarre, but the method, though controversial, is unquestionably a success. (See the best social networking applications.)

You've likely read some of Demand's content without realizing it. Founded in 2006, the company runs a slew of popular Internet portals, including eHow.com Cracked.com and Livestrong.com that receive 100 million hits a month — more traffic than any of the digital properties of Disney, NBC, ESPN or, yes, Time Inc. The company, based in Santa Monica, Calif., is also directing an army of freelancers to write stories that appear in traditional media outlets, most notably in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's weekly travel section, and a Demand executive says more deals with large off-line brands will be announced soon. (See the 50 best websites of 2009.)

The finely tuned assembly line is the brainchild of Demand's co-founder Richard Rosenblatt. Best known as the CEO of Intermix Media, owner of MySpace, when the company was sold for $580 million to News Corp. in 2005, Rosenblatt says he learned from his experience with social networks that there were plenty of people producing reams of data online. "But only 1% of that was relevant to more than just people's friends," he says. "What if we could find a way to find those content creators, tell them what to write and create a broader audience?"

It's a business model that starts with mountains of user-behavior data, culled from search engines, YouTube and Demand's websites. To make money, the company also needed to factor in advertising data and figure out which keywords are the most lucrative to create content around. All this gets fed into an algorithm that spits out only the most-in-demand story ideas, no human guesswork required. Sometimes the results make sense ("Nightlife in Paris," for example), but the computer often generates cryptic or oddly specific titles as well, like "How to Start a Lace-Wig Business in Maryland" or "How to Make a Room with a Waterfall." (See the top iPhone applications.)

For now, though, Demand still needs humans — namely, writers, editors and video producers — to crank out content. That's where its horde of more than 7,000 freelancers comes in. One person earns a few cents for taking the algorithm's output and turning it into a headline. Another person writes the article, typically earning $3 to $15, depending on the specified length, and passes it on to a copy editor, who banks $3.50 for fact-checking and fiddling with grammar. All told, it may take less than a day, at a cost of less than $10, for a short article to move through the system and get posted on one of Demand's sites, where it immediately starts earning ad revenue.

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