Content Generators by keywords

The picture shows Richard Rosenblatt, 40, Richard Rosenblatt, executive director of Demand Media , which is now planning an IPO with an estimated value of $ 1.5 billion . Richard founded the company in 2006, about six months after he sold MySpace to media magnate Rupert Murdoch.

Richard Rosenblatt came up with a project that over the past four years made a quiet revolution in online media and put content generation on the conveyor. Experts call his brainchild a "symbiosis of Ford and Gutenberg."

Demand Media is creating a huge amount of exclusive content specifically to attract search traffic for rare but expensive key requests. The company generates 180,000 articles and videos per month - all of them are posted on company-owned websites (eHow.com, etc.), as well as on YouTube. Today Demand Media is the largest generator of video content on YouTube, five times superior to the nearest competitor.

The company employs 8,000 low-paid freelancers, as well as a staff of thousands of editors. The heart of the system is the algorithm for extracting keywords from search engines. The algorithm also assigns each “keyword” its potential value, depending on popularity. The second algorithm (Knowledge Engine) generates phrases based on the statistics of search queries with these keywords. Headers go through proofreaders who approve or reject them (8 cents each). The second stage of proofreaders turns them into real headlines for articles. Then the editors who place the order in the central repository and the freelancers who write the text come into play (the one who grabbed the order received the order for $ 15). At the last stage, another staff of editors is involved in reading the text and correcting errors ($ 2.50 per article). Having received an approving status in the repository, the content is automatically published on the site.
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In all details the scheme of the company is described here , as well as shown in the diagram .

Gains from attracting traffic for contextual advertising. In an interview with Wired , Innovation Director Demand Media gives an example of such a rare and expensive search query: “Where can I donate my car in Dallas?”. Going through such advertising with Google costs $ 15 or $ 20 per click. Neither the algorithm, nor the editors, nor the freelancer have a clue why someone needs to donate their car in Dallas, but this is a fact. So they make an article on this topic and get their share of clicking links.

Similar search queries from the “long tail” are also long-playing, so even after a complete cessation of content generation, the company will make a very long time profit on its content base of millions of articles and videos.

However, Demand Media is not alone. Associated Content also uses a similar business model, which also employs thousands of freelancers. In May, Associated Content became part of Yahoo.

This seems to be the future of online media. At least, tens of thousands of journalists dismissed from print media will have a place to work: they will be able to make a living as content generators on the conveyor, where the topics for articles are chosen by the machine.