Demand Media courts major publishers

Last week Demand Media – an Los Angeles based startup that creates website content tailored to search engine queries – pitched its content to several major media publishers in New York. Steven Kydd, the Demand Media executive vice-president, made rounds visiting the New York Times among others, and left a trail of articles and blogposts behind him. For several years, Demand Media was mainly focused on pushing its own portfolio of sites such as Livestrong.com and eHow.com . Now, CEO Richard Rosenblatt says there are several major publishers which are experimenting with Demand Media content. Founded in 2006, Demand Media only started to attract attention from journalists and bloggers when it leapfrogged the New York Times to enter the top 20 largest US online properties. Since then, it has been labelled a "content farm", "answer factory", "demonic", "flooding the internet with unwanted content" and told to "go to hell" . Journalists are fascinated by the concept of the "content factory" . They are frightened. Why do they react so strongly? "I think it is the fear of traditional model changing," says Rosenblatt, former chairman of MySpace, who founded the company with private-equity executive Shawn Colo. And it is changing, indeed. It is not only that 7,000 freelance editors, writers and video producers as well as 650 copy editors work for the company. Demand Media produces more than 4,500 items of content a day, and it uses algorithms to produce that content most effectively. Previously, news organisations published content based on what their editors thought readers were interested in. Now, the internet gives publishers access to hundreds of millions of people's search queries. That is where Demand Media's algorithms come in. "Our search algorithm delivers keywords like 'pruning roses', 'naming babies', or 'hiking'," says Rosenblatt. "We take these keywords and turn them into article titles, and use that to influence what we are going to create." But Demand Media is taking it further. After learning about web users' interests, Demand Media calculates if an article is commercially relevant. The company calculates the advertising demand by using another database, and looks if there isn't too much competition for its content because the topic has been widely reported online. If the outcome is correct, it assigns a freelancer to produce content. How can that help the struggling media houses? "We want to create commercial content," says Rosenblatt, who insists he is not in the news business but in the information business. "News has a short life; immediately after it is written the news is not relevant any more," he says. "In addition to that, everything is on the same topic that everybody else is writing about. If you do a search on health care reform, you find about 40,000 articles, and they are not different enough. That is not a sustainable business model for the internet." For Rosenblatt, news organisations sit on a huge worthless archive of articles that have become irrelevant, at least until someone finds a new business model for them. Demand Media, on the other hand, is producing content for the long tail. "Evergreen", he calls it. "I think the production of news is incredibly important; we need the economy and politics to be covered. But news has a short life. And the content we create is long lasting." Rosenblatt has a point. News organisations produce for the moment as they are focused on breaking news. Now, what was their asset seems to have become their weakness as their production is irrelevant for the long tail. When it came to the internet, news organisations were blinded by the thing that was the biggest hindrance to their news stories: the deadline. They started to produce their content for 24/7, launching up-to-date content they could use on their homepage. They were often unaware of the importance of the long tail – and that is where Demand Media says it comes in. "We can supplement publishers' news content with service journalism, and evergreen helpful kind of content. And hopefully they can make enough revenue from that. Maybe we can help news organisations in finding a business model," says Rosenblatt. (Disclosure: Since January 2008 The Guardian has been working with Pluck, which has owned by Demand Media since March 2008)