4:14am,  Brooklyn

Demand Media is Profiled in the November Wired: "Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell"

Last week, I tossed and turned over the successful online publishing formula of Smashing Magazine.  Simple sounding in principle, Smashing’s approach is to develop enduring, high-quality content and to cultivate an audience with it.   Each post is packed with value and is published to a hungry base of Tweeps and RSS subscribers, becoming  instantly SEO’d upon publication.  If this was easy to do, then Smashing wouldn’t be such an outlier (see table below), and I would be sleeping soundly in a villa on Bequia instead of up right now writing this.    Tonight, my insomniac ramblings are focused in another direction, on a profitable online publisher who takes the exact opposite approach: cranking out low-quality content and spending as little as possible on it’s production.  Reading the new issue of Wired (November), I was fascinated and disturbed by the story of Richard Rosenblatt and his Demand Media.  Quoting Daniel Roth, the author, “Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has discovered.  Online content is not worth very much.”  The art, therefore, is in cost control – which is done in two ways.  1) Demand channels The Algorithm to tell them precisely what consumers are searching for, where gaps in the existing online content exist, and what advertisers might be willing to pay for.   2) Demand hires a new breed of freelancer who is expert at cranking out passionless, utilitarian content at wages that would make your average Hyderabad call center rep storm out in protest.

Read the rest of this entry »