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How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day

In August we reviewed Demand Media, one of the largest producers of content on the Web
today. Wired Magazine recently compared Demand Media’s content business to Henry Ford’s production line for cars. Demand Media currently produces 4,000 new pieces of content a day. What’s more, it’s increasingly syndicating this content to media sites outside of its own network of vertical websites. In other words, Demand Media is becoming a very large content production factory for third party sites such as Yahoo.

In this follow-up post, we dive deeper into Demand Media’s content production model – and ask questions about the quality of the output.

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This article is based on an interview I conducted with several Demand Media executives, including founder Richard Rosenblatt, at the Web 2.0 Summit in September.

Will Demand Media Soon be a Household Name?

In our previous posts, we’ve noted that Demand Media is rapidly rising up the comScore list of the top 50 web properties in the U.S. – in July it was #24, in September it was #15. At this rate, Demand Media will soon be one of the top 10 Web properties in the U.S. – right up there with Amazon, eBay, Apple.

Think about that: how many of you had heard of Demand Media before this year? Amazon, eBay and Apple are all household names. Demand Media (along with another fast-growing mega content site, Answers.com) could be a household name soon too, if its current growth rate continues.

Behind this remarkable growth is a very large output of content each and every day, fueled by thousands of freelance writers and content creators.

So how does Demand Media produce so much content every day? 4,000 new articles a day is a quantum leap above the 20-30 new posts a day that the most feverish of professional blogs pump out.

About Demand Studios

Demand Media produces so much content with a system it calls Demand Studios. It’s a proprietary editorial system which is part human-processed and part automated.

The system starts with an automated process, crunching data and running it through an algorithm to identify story ideas that have the best chance of success. The algorithm factors in audience type, ability to attract advertising and potential for traffic.

For a written piece of content, human editors will then check the top story contenders. Potential titles are placed into a pool for writer selection. Once a writer picks up a story, it gets written up, goes through a fact checking and copy editing process (including a plagiarism check), and finally the editorial team approves the completed article. The article is eventually published and the writer gets paid.

This is a simplification of the Demand Studios process, which happens 4,000 times every day! The system appears to be an efficient mix of automation and human labor. As we’ll see on Page 2 of this post, the editorial process isn’t foolproof. But even so, the scale of this system is impressive.

As at the end of October, Demand Studios had created more than one million original pieces of content, both text articles and
videos. There are more than 6,000 active Demand Studios freelance creators – including writers, filmmakers, title proofers, copy editors.

In my meeting with Demand Media executives at the recent Web 2.0 Summit, I was told that an average of 11 people – and 15 unique roles – touch a piece of content as it flows through Demand Studios. The company argues that this, along with community rating of content, produces quality content.

But does it, actually?

Next Page: The Quality Question…

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