[byrneseyeview]

They're also important. If Mahalo, Demand Media, etc. all continue to do what they're doing, then they'll have built a publisher-paid paywall around most of the content online.

That is bad news for anyone who tries to get long-tail organic search traffic. It's good news for sites with great brand names, but terrible news for anyone else.

[qeorge]

Its not fair to lump Demand in with Mahalo. Demand's business model is filling in holes with their own original content, not scraping (or "aggregating") other people's content.

AFAIK, Google views their relationship as symbiotic, not parasitic.

[byrneseyeview]

Demand Media does not produce high quality content. They product content that is good enough to rank (i.e. it's written in English) and unique. But they have a strong incentive to have bad content! If your article on "how to make pancakes" tells someone how to make pancakes, they close their tab and make pancakes; if it's 300 words of "original content" that makes no sense, you'll end up clicking through to another site (that has to pay for the privilege).

When you think of how many struggling freelancers use those long-tail guides to build their business ("How to shoot a commercial for a gym," or "How to write brochure copy for life insurance,"), you can see the magnitude of this problem. People who could trade their time for traffic now have to trade their money for traffic. When they're just getting started, money is harder to come by than time. The result: fewer people creating this kind of content, more of them joining organizations that pay for the traffic instead.

[qeorge]

As I understand it, their algorithm looks for keywords with little to no competition, but at least ~$10/year potential in AdSense revenue. If they can find such a keyword, they pay someone ~$5 to write an article or make a video on the topic.

The result isn't Pulitzer worthy, but its a lot better than you're making it out to be.

Using your example, here's the wikiHow article on "how to make pancakes":

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Pancakes

Its quite informative. How would you suggest they improve it?

[greyman]

But, doesn't Demand only occupy one slot in search engines result pages for a certain keyword search? Even if Demand would create billions of articles, one for each conceivable search term, other nine spots in first 10 search results are still available for others, aren't they?

All in all, I still think this is primary a Google problem, not Demand's. They can publish anything they want, it's their right protected under free speech. It's Google which should be concerned about quality of their pages.

[byrneseyeview]

The #1 search result gets about 40% of all organic clicks. And Demand Media has more than one property (eHow, Wikihow, Cracked, livestrong.com). So I wouldn't be surprised if there were some searches for which Demand Media got more than half of all traffic.

You are correct about this being Google's problem. These guys exist to exploit an arbitrage opportunity: Google's search algorithm picks them, and the average searcher's which-engine-do-I-choose algorithm picks Google. In the long run, one of these things will stop being true.

[qeorge]

Cracked is not owned by Demand Media. It was a second-rate competitor to MAD as a print magazine, but has found tremendous success online.

Their model is similar to Demand's in that it is UGC + payment, but that's about it. The topics are not generated by an algorithm, for instance.

[byrneseyeview]

http://www.demandmedia.com/brands/

I was surprised, too.

[_delirium]

There's something about their content feels fake, though. When I run across one of their pages in a search, it's not always terrible, but if I don't initially notice where I am, I sometimes get this weird feeling that the text I'm reading isn't quite right, and might not actually contain any information. It frequently has this pumping-out-words-to-fill-the-page feeling, very strongly reminiscent of high-school students' essays.

[bhp]

The concept is important, but the personal attacks (link bait) is what I'm referring to, and is unnecessary.

[detst]

Perhaps unnecessary but they certainly draw more attention and increase the likelihood that something will be done.

[zaidf]

I thought Demand Media was all about original content?

[byrneseyeview]

They are about "original content" in the Google sense. It's not quality content, just well-SEO'd stuff that is 1) good enough for Google to think it's grammatically-correct English, but 2) bad enough that contextual ads on the article will still get clicks.

[patio11]

Guys, draw a big circle around point #2 here and remember it: Demand Media understands the user psychology of CPC ads better than any Valley startup you've ever heard of. They want their content to suck because if it satisfies the users' needs then the users will not click the ads. If, on the other hand, it introduces the topic and leaves the user feeling "Where do I go next?", then the only options from a Demand Media page are either a) other worthless articles or b) CPC ads. And people choose door #2 quite frequently.

This kind of frustrates me to the extent that I compete with Demand Media (limited, but real), because there is absolutely no circumstance under which a Demand Media article is a better result for the user than a page on my site if we're in competition, but Demand Media has the economics of it nailed such that they can produce content for some genres at scales I can't possibly keep up without duplicating their core strategy (automated keyword selection -> cheap freelancer -> post without substantial quality control), pushing my related content out of the SERPs and then charging me for the clicks I would otherwise be getting for free.

[byrneseyeview]

I got Point #2 from your blog, by the way. So thanks!

[enjo]

Do you rank better for pages you do compete on head-to-head?

[bobbyi]

They are important, but this one didn't really add any new information beyond the ones we've already seen.