[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.

[skinnymuch]

Wow. Can't believe they own Cracked. Learning this made me die a little inside.