Working for the Web's Big Content Machine

The result is a company that's able to produce profitable content on a scale that traditional news organizations can only envy. Demand estimates that it took in $200 million in revenue in 2009, enough to turn a profit. It helps that none but the company's most prolific content creators get health insurance or, for that matter, a minimum hourly wage. Critics have dubbed the company a digital sweatshop. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, has called Demand "demonic," and many writers prickle at the thought of being paid a few cents — rather than a few dollars — per word.

It's not unfair criticism. The best way to make decent money through Demand, as I discovered, is to research and write at breakneck pace, and the result is content that only just squeaks through the system. Working as fast as possible, I could make close to $60 an hour at Demand, a nice improvement on what I'm paid for my day job, but I'd be producing articles that were thinly sourced and poorly written. (See 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

Demand does have standards, however. Every article requires at least one source (no Wikipedia allowed), and would-be writers are required to submit a résumé and writing samples, and the company says the approval rate is less than 50%. I'm a journalism-school graduate with a full-time job at a magazine (the one you're reading right now); I got in, but a friend with less journalism experience did not.

As part of my moonlighting experiment, I pushed through an article with a few factual errors. A copy editor bounced it back with a terse note to check my sourcing. When I strayed too far from an assignment's parameters, I was asked for a rewrite. All told, 40% of the 20 or so articles I submitted required some additional work before they got posted. My deliberate haste and sloppiness with Demand stories have led copy editors to give me, on a five-point scale, a pretty crummy 3.5 for grammar and 3.7 for research. If my scores dip too low, Demand will banish me from the system. (See 25 websites you can't live without.)

If you fault its product, you're missing the point, says co-founder Shawn Colo. "It doesn't pay to do journalism," he says. He's right. Sending writers to Haiti, for example, would defy the company's No. 1 rule: Every piece has to be profitable. That's why Demand's algorithm favors quick explainer pieces like "How to Remove Dents in a Hair Dryer." (See 10 perfect jobs for the recession — and after.)

As much as Demand execs say they don't want to do journalism, they think they can offer it some help. The company envisions its how-tos running alongside stories in more traditional media, sharing revenue and reducing the need for news outlets to produce certain types of service-oriented content. "We're not saying we're going to save traditional media. That's arrogant," Rosenblatt says. "But we're definitely not going to kill it."

That's only part of the company's vision. The other is to keep amping up its production: more writers, more sites and a lot more stories. One of the tenets in the company's manifesto is "Never rest."

The same applies to all the cogs like me in Demand's ever whirring machine. After Google helped me track down an article that claims people near a small city in Kenya see the giraffe as a divine omen of good luck (close enough), which I used as a source for my piece, I am ready to tackle my next assignment: home remedies to remove cat urine from parquet floors. Florid prose it may not be, but according to Demand, it's what you want to read.

See the best pictures of 2009.

See 25 people who mattered in 2009.