I first became aware of Demand Media by reading this feature by Daniel Roth in the November 2009 issue of Wired [ Ed: ReadWriteWeb wrote a feature about it in August ] . In fact, Roth alerted me by email that his piece was about to come online, because he thought I would find it interesting. He was dead on. I found it fascinating, and also scary. Since then the discussion of these "content farms" (what ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus called them recently) has picked up a lot intensity online. For a good round-up, see Jason Fry's recent post The Furor Over Content Farms . In the following interview with Demand Media founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, I explore this new online phenomenon. Sponsor Jay Rosen teaches journalism at NYU and blogs at PressThink , which won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award. He is also the director of NewAssignment.Net and blogs at the Huffington Post. I've been discussing Demand Media a bit on Twitter, always referring to it as... (the demonic) Demand Media. This got the attention of someone from the company because I heard from Richard Rosenblatt, the founder and CEO, who said that I didn't understand the firm's mission. I asked him if he would do an interview with me to clarify what that mission was. He graciously agreed. Today I caught up with him by IM and we had the following exchange. Rosen : In the November 2009 Wired article by Daniel Roth, this was the part I thought most important: "Most media companies are trying hard to... boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it -- perhaps an impossible proposition -- the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value." Now, when you wrote to me, you said I didn't get the mission of Demand Media. As I understand it, the mission is to make a ton of money on the Web by using data mining to understand demand and then cutting costs in this way Roth described. Do I have it wrong? Rosenblatt : It's not all about cost cutting but about building a sustainable media model that allows us to achieve our mission to build an engine for what the world wants to know and share. We do this by connecting consumers with content that meets their specific interests and [offers] connections to people that share their passion. To do this well, and at scale, has required significant innovation and investment. Rosen : Here's what I think Demand Media has right. It's important to know what people are interested in. It's good to have tools that tell us what they wish to know. Using that knowledge to guide production is innovation, too, which we need-- precisely because production is so easy and cheap and the tools are so good. But here's what I think bothers a lot of people, and leads to a description of your firm as a "content farm" or "factory." I read about the 11 people - and 15 different roles - involved in the production of articles and video in Demand Studios. I get your idea that "quality is based on relevance." But if you're trying to match costs to the available revenue for a given piece of content, what happens when editorial quality requires costs greater that what's available in search revenue? And who's watching out for that point? Rosenblatt : I like the way you describe and characterize our business; maybe we have a lot more in common that you think. We are building content that is evergreen and solving a different type of problem. We are focused on creating content that solves problems, answers questions, saves money, saves time, makes you laugh - content that improves people's lives in big and small ways. It's relevant and impactful to millions and millions of people every day. It must generally fit within the economic framework the Internet provides today. As those economics change so will we. Rosen : Okay I got that but I am not sure it answers this part of my question: ...if you're trying to match costs to the available revenue for a given piece of content, what happens when editorial quality requires costs greater that what's available in search revenue? And who's watching out for that point? Rosenblatt : We only make content that we think can be done responsibly and within our cost structure. Rosen : As you know, there's a conversation going on out there about Demand Media, and I want to show you a bit of it. The premise, as Jeff Jarvis puts it, is that companies like yours (and Associated Content, to name another) "produce crap that's just good enough to fool algorithms," especially Google's. This is said to be a problem for Google. So Jarvis writes, "I think we may see search fall as the sole or even key means of discovery and filtering of quality content. I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter). Note again that Bit.ly alone causes as many clicks a month -- one billion -- as Google News. Human power rises again. That's what Fred Wilson says today when he argues that social beats search, because "it's a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph." What do to you think of Wilson's idea, "social beats search" because it cannot be gamed as easily? If he's right, isn't that a threat to Demand Media's profits? Rosenblatt : First of all, we're not filling up search engines. We're creating content that lives on some of the most engaging websites in the world. These sites have really amazing tools that truly help people - whether it's managing your diabetes, motivating yourself to stop smoking, helping you drop your golf handicap, or determining what hike to take the kids on this weekend. And I wouldn't say we are even "search-led" any more. We are led by consumer demand. We are maniacally focused on giving users exactly what they want, where they want it. We have algorithms that tell us what search visitors want. And algorithms that tell us what YouTube visitors prefer. And we're working on new algorithms that tell us what social network users desire. And we're pretty sure the needs of mobile users will be different than all of the above - so we'll tune our approach for them too. Search is just where we started, because that's where most consumers started their information seeking experiences. But the world has changed a lot since we started Demand Media four years ago - and we're changing with it. Rosen : So you're getting social too and moving away from just search? Rosenblatt : Absolutely and have been planning this for years; we consider this a core part of our business and social has been at the center of our business since we started Rosen : Does the description of your company as a "content farm," content mill, factory (or even digital sweatshop) seem to you inaccurate or point missing in some way? I mean I know these are not nice terms or polite descriptions but are they wrong headed? Rosenblatt : Completely missing the point. We have significant editorial processes. Let me explain. How do we do this? We hire qualified professional writers, film-makers and copyeditors. Set clear editorial objectives and style guidelines for every piece. Require external sources with every submission. Copy edit what's been turned in. Fact-check it. Check it for plagiarism. Rate each piece so that writers get feedback. Provide education to improve the team members. Perform quality audits and take down content that doesn't meet current standards (thousands per month). Weed out content creators who aren't performing well or improving fast enough (we let go more than 100 creators per month). What's more like a sweatshop: someone's living room working their own hours or a typical newsroom? Rosen : When you're trying to build trust in an editorial brand, you pay those costs when they exceed available revenues, which I talked about. But it seems to me that Demand isn't trying to build trust in that way, it's trying to create content that meets demand, stays relevant and grabs the available search revenue. Why doesn't Demand Media create the bulk of its content under the Demand brand, like Reuters, say? Rosenblatt : We believe that the Internet continues to fragment and passionate audiences want their own community and brand. The brands we are focused on: our Web sites such as eHOW, Livestrong and our other properties. This is where we focus our branding energy. Rosen : As you know, journalism is in a good deal of peril today because of a collapsing economic model. I've read that Demand does not want to go anywhere near news, which is interesting, but do you feel you have discovered anything that would be useful to journalists as they try to survive Rosenblatt : We respect journalists very much. We think they need to use technology to help them figure out what audiences want and how to get value from their content more effectively. And there are big opportunities for them to increase quality by removing inefficiencies in the process of content creation. We would love to partner with as many publishers and media outlets as we can Rosen : You seem to know how to make money on the Web, why not get into news? Rosenblatt : Because we haven't figure out how to do it responsibly and profitably also, its completely saturated and highly competitive. Consumers already have more sources than they need. Rosen : Someone who follows my work and knew I was interviewing you told me to ask you this: Do you love the Web? The implied question there is: if you love the Web, then why are you doing this, running these content farms... ? Rosenblatt : OMG. My entire career and life has been about the Web. Trying to innovate and create value where open spaces exist. We do not have a content mill as we discussed but an efficient method to get people the information they need when they want it. That is improving the Internet and I am proud of it Rosen : Open spaces? What does that phrase mean? Rosenblatt : Where there is a lot of room for opportunity for not only our company but for other entrepreneurs. Rosen : I know you have a meeting to run to... thanks very much... anything you wish to add? Rosenblatt : I hope to see you in NY in the future to continue our dialogue. All my best and happy holidays. Check out ReadWriteWeb's entire coverage of Demand Media and content farms: Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried How Google Can Combat Content Farms Demand Media Is a Page View Generating Machine - And it's Working Answers.com: 31 Million Copied and Pasted Web Pages Can't Go Wrong The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day Ad-Driven Content - Is it Crossing The Line? Discuss

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Jay Rosen Interviews Demand Media: Are Content Farms "Demonic"?

"Recommended." -HP Official News "Very thorough. Exceeded my expectations. Nice work." -Henry "Hank" Nothhaft, Jr. Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SRI "The report is excellent -- a great synthesis of why the real time web is different, what changes, what doesn't and what the industry needs in order to press forward." - John Borthwick CEO, Betaworks Those are just a few of the things that people have said about our newly released research report The Real-Time Web and its Future so far. Want to know what's included in the report? Check out the Table of Contents and the full text of the Introduction below. Sponsor RWWfinalTOC That's the Table of Contents and below is the full text of the introduction to the report. We hope you'll purchase this report via this link - and check out our package deals for purchasing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management as well! What is The Real-Time Web? Beyond Twitter and Facebook Dave Winer defines the real-time Web in four words: "It Happens Without Waiting."1 That's true, and appropriately vague. The phrase "real-time Web" means different things for different people and it's too early in the game to have anything but a loose, inclusive definition. Many of the different forms the real-time Web takes do have some common benefits, user experience elements, lessons learned, pitfalls and possibilities. This is what we explore in this report. It's definitely a whole lot more than just Twitter and Facebook, though these are the best known instances of what's referred to as the real-time Web. Someday Facebook may open up its user data and play a larger role in the real-time Web than just the introduction to the stream model that it plays today. Someday Twitter may grow, discover how to retain users and effectively encourage more than the small number of people who today create the vast majority of content on that service. Today engineers estimate that Twitter sees about 1 thousand messages published per second and between 5 and 10 million links shared per day, before de-duplication. That sounds like a lot, but the real-time Web as a whole is already much, much larger than Twitter. For infrastructure provider Kaazing, the real-time Web is using HTML5 Web Sockets technology to push live financial information to the Web browsers of banking customers that had always been limited to desktop applications for security reasons. For consumer web app Pip.io, the real-time Web is creating an XMPP-powered chat-like experience for users to communicate with friends around objects like a Google Map or a streaming Netflix video playing in the Pip.io web OS. For semantic recommendation company Evri, the real-time Web is the ebbing and flowing of traffic data on Wikipedia. That data points to hot topics that Evri needs to build topic pages to serve their publisher customers. For search engine OneRiot, the real-time Web is made up of the links people share on Twitter ...as well as Digg, Delicious and the click-streams of more than a million users who have opted-in to exposing what they see online through the OneRiot toolbar. For Q&A service Aardvark, the real-time Web is the people inside the social circle of a user who happens to be available online at a given moment and interested in the topic of a user's question. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs that now deliver updated content to any other application that subscribes to a PubSubHubbub or RSSCloud feed, immediately after that content is published. NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen says the real-time Web creates a sense of flow for users that's comparable to the way television holds our attention. Google's Brett Slatkin, developer of the PubSubHubbub real-time protocol, says the real-time Web is a foundation for efficient computing and use cases we can't yet even imagine. In writing this report we interviewed 50 people who work on technologies that power or leverage what they consider to be the real-time Web. Those people have had a very diverse array of experiences, but articulate a common story. It's a story of increased computational efficiency - and software that struggles to keep users from feeling overwhelmed. It's a story of radically new possibilities but strategies based on adding value in conjunction with more traditional, slower moving online resources. We hope you enjoy reading this overview of the emerging real-time Web. We believe this phenomenon is one that will play a major role in the Web and world of the future. The page-based model of destination sites, created by centralized expertise and navigated through authority-based search and clicking link by link is being transcended. We think this survey of current strategies and experiences to date will prove very useful in helping you effectively participate in and help build the future of the real-time Web. Discuss

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Introduction to The Real-Time Web and its Future

Through the bravery and efforts of people such as our good friend Drew Olanoff and the LIVESTRONG campaign, many social media users are much more aware of cancer and what this disease does to the body, mind, soul and community. Today, on World AIDS Day, we'd like to direct your attention to a few folks on the social web who are facing lives with HIV/AIDS and have made the same brave choice to share that experience with the rest of us. Read on for bits and pieces of their stories as well as feeds and lists that will keep their struggles and triumphs in your thoughts. Sponsor Shawn Decker's ShawnandGwenn.com Decker, who is a public speaker educator and advocate, blogs with girlfriend Gwenn Barringer about his own struggles with the virus and the challenges of being in an HIV-asymmetrical couple. With the success I've had keeping my numbers stable, I broached the topic of trying one week on, two weeks off meds... My reason for wanting a longer break has been absent-mindedness and lethargy... It's especially frustrating on the days when things just aren't clicking in the old nugget; like when I wake up feeling exhausted instead of rested or, in the middle of a shower, I wonder if I've already washed my hair or not. This tends to happen after a couple of days on meds. Steve Schalchlin's Bonus Round Schalchlin is one of the first HIV/AIDS bloggers, beginning his blog in 1996. Also a songwriter, Schalchlin put his story into music that his partner, playwright Jim Brochu, turned into The Last Session , a musical about a man's struggle with AIDS. In Flash Forward, some of the characters are saying, "The future saved me." I remember when I could see my future. And like this character, there was a certain comfort in knowing I had only just so much time and no more. I'm reminded of the old Chinese saying about how a child who dies has the longest life and an old man, the shortest. I know that that state of mind, of perfect freedom, is available. I know it is because it's only a state of mind. Having gone there, I know what it feels and tastes and smells like. The question is whether I have to know when I'm gonna die to get there again. Kenn Chaplin's My Journey With AIDS Chaplin is a blogger who faces AIDS and is a survivor of childhood and adult trauma and adult-diagnosed mental illness. When diagnosed with HIV in 1989, and AIDS a few years later, it was suggested that I probably had a maximum of ten years to live. In fact I did nearly die of cryptospoidiosis which my doctor still talks about with a sense of marvel. It only seemed logical that I should accept the reality, with countless friends dying around me, and try to live into death with as much grace as I could muster. What I asserted was realism some friends took to be pessimism. One I think of in particular eventually drifted away as, it seems to me, she could neither tolerate what I believed to be reasonable thoughts of dying nor the fact that my health was, to her, no longer of imminent concern. James McLarty-Lopez's Still Arriving McLarty-Lopez is a young, recently married gay man. His blog references medications he takes, side effects he experiences and his general feelings about this part of his life. Chad and I last night were discussing Justin's passing. While very sad it was only a matter of time... I have been tired many times. I have been weak many times. However, through the times in the valley I have always said "I want to live." In comparison, Justin too said he wanted to live, the difference being, he waited far too late to make that decision. He was only 24 and ravaged with HIV and AIDS defining illnesses. Who knows why Justin never really sought treatment? Perhaps the stigma of having HIV stopped him. Perhaps he just didn't want to have to acknowledge the fact he had it. The only person who could have answered that is gone. Speculation will neither ease the pain nor bring him back. Now it's about remembering his smile and moving on with the lesson of I want to live. To subscribe to a 12-blog feed of blogs from folks living with and writing about HIV/AIDS, click here . Also, we've put together a Twitter list of people who live with HIV/AIDS and people who medically treat, advocate for and work with HIV/AIDS sufferers. What better way to observe World AIDS Day than by actually reading the words and understanding the challenges of those who actually live with AIDS or HIV and are unashamed and courageous enough to share those stories with us? Discuss

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Positively Social: Blogging & Tweeting with AIDS/HIV

Unified communications was a notable absent In Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. For years, the idea of a common platform for seemingly all communications seemed bewildering. Cisco CEO John Chambers said that even CIO's were unsure what unified communications really meant. But now here it is raising its flag once again with predictions from ABI Research that the unified communications market will jump from $302 million in 2008 to $4.3 billion by 2014. Seems like a big jump? Not really if you compare it to what at least one other analyst group is predicting. Sponsor Interestingly, the reason for the growth may be in part due to cloud computing, which not surprising is the number one technology on Gartner's list for 2010. For years, unified communications has held promise as a product or suite of products that had a unifying user interface that, according to Wikipedia , would integrate real-time communication services "such as as instant messaging (chat); presence information; IP telephony; video conferencing; call control and speech recognition with non real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax)." Over the years, camps divided as people grappled with the idea of how all these technologies come together. Cisco recently dumped the term "unified communications," in favor of "Cisco Collaboration." They are smart over at Cisco. Collaboration is definitely the new black . There's not a lot new behind the curtain but collaboration has an edge to it that is getting the attention of the enterprise. But now comes along cloud computing and the vendors seem to be learning that perhaps unified communications should be treated as a service. Vendors like Cisco are teaming up with SaaS services like Salesforce.com and VOIP providers such as Skype. The potential proves to In-Stat that the market for unified communications will jump to $39 billion by 2013. It may be easy to poke fun a the hype around cloud computing these days. But there is actual proof that whatever you want to call it, cloud computing is playing a significant part in the growth of unified communications. Services that interconnect across devices and provide the capability for collaboration are emerging in a variety of flavors. More proof of what is to come? Aire-Spring represents a new breed of telecommunications companies. They are also one of the fastest growing operators. The comany has built an IP network from scratch. The company is processing 4 billion calls annually. Those are big numbers fitting for a market that is just about to burst. Discuss

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Unified Communications: Saved by the Cloud?

According to a statement made today by Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone, the company is interested in acquiring more companies to expand upon their current core set of features. At a news conference held in Tel Aviv, Stone was quoted as saying that acquisitions are "something we are definitely interested in. We made an acquisition last year that turned out to be an outstandingly good decision." The acquisition he's referring to is Twitter's purchase of Summize , a real-time search engine that has now become search.twitter.com . Since that original purchase in summer of 2008, Twitter has made no other moves or indications that they were interested in buying other companies, seemingly more focused on quashing bugs, acquiring funding and partnering with major search engines like Bing and Google . Meanwhile, the ecosystem of Twitter applications exploded, and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter's service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering? Sponsor Apparently, there may be a few apps that have already caught Twitter's interest. Stone told the crowd in Tel Aviv that "our attention is grabbed by some of these developers," and the company plans to "take a hard look at them." What Companies are on Twitter's Radar? Which applications do you suppose have crossed Twitter's radar? Some insight may be found on Twitter's "goodies" page where the company lists a handful of apps, widgets, and website buttons which Twitter users can browse through and download. Here, desktop Twitter clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck are promoted alongside mobile applications like Twitterific and PocketTweets . However, the complete app list seems a little out-of-date when compared with what today's Twitterers are actually using, especially on the mobile front. According to a study from August of this year, iPhone apps like Tweetie and TwitterFon are just as popular as Twitterific - if not more so - as is the Blackberry app TwitterBerry . And the one-time popular Twitter app Twhirl, an Adobe AIR desktop client, has long since been overshadowed by the more robust TweetDeck and similar web counterparts. Among those web counterparts are the new tools from Seesmic and Brizzly , both of which have been garnering attention as of late, especially when they each introduced support for Twitter's new "lists" feature earlier this month. But client applications are only a small slice of the entire Twitter app universe. There are also games, blog and email plugins, utilities, analytics and search tools, shopping services, URL shortners and so much more. Plus, there are sites that attempt to aggregate the chaos into some sort of meaningful structure, like the oneforty.com website, for example, often called Twitter's unofficial "app store" by its fans. While we could only guess at which applications Twitter would want to adopt as their "official" clients or services, a good guess may involve some of the media sharing tools that have been popularized by a number of Twitter users wanting to share photos and videos in addition to plain text. TwitPic comes to mind as one of the top photo-sharing clients and TwitVid or Tweetube may be considered for video shares. These sorts of acquisitions seem to fit better with Twitter's goal of expanding upon the core functionality of Twitter. Where before, the company was content with its simple 140-character updates, recent changes, including the integration of the URL-shortening service bit.ly , Twitter lists , geolocation features and a new implementation of the "re-tweet" structure seem to hint at Twitter's desire to add more layers of complexity to the once-basic service. More Acquisitions Could be Too Much of a Good Thing However, Twitter needs to be careful not to add too much. Up until now, the service has grown organically , with a lot of its features and conventions implemented by its own user and developer community outside of the official channels. Bog it down too much with extra add-ons and new behaviors, and Twitter may scare off potential new users who already often struggle with figuring out what to do with the service in its simple form. Plus, longtime Twitterers may also be put-off to see their favorite clients or services ignored in favor of whatever companies Twitter chooses to bless through an acquisition deal. And once acquired, competing companies could wither and fade away, unable to compete, eventually leading their developers to cut their losses and move on. What Should Twitter Acquire? Earlier this year, we listed ten companies that Twitter should acquire next . Not surprisingly, some of the companies or their features have already been implemented, including bit.ly's URL shortening service and the geo-location feature we mentioned. Meanwhile, another app on the list, FriendFeed , has already been acquired by Facebook, leaving our original list much shorter and now in need of an update. Given Twitter's intentions to start a shopping spree sometime in the near future, we wonder what apps will make their list. We also wonder if more Twitter acquisitions will end up being a good thing for the company and the community as a whole, or if it will end up stifling competition in what is now a thriving ecosystem of innovation and development. We hope Twitter proceeds cautiously and wisely in this area - any major unwelcome changes have the ability to alienate the very community that made Twitter what it is today. Discuss

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What Apps Should Twitter Acquire?

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. Business and social uses of Twitter have gotten most of the attention since the social platform hit the mainstream. But Twitter's benefit to charities and worthwhile causes is just as obvious, and we're now starting to see more and more uses in this sphere. Sponsor Witness the #beatcancer campaign , which made it into the Guinness World Records for tweeting its way to raise $70,000 in 24 hours for four cancer-fighting organizations. Twitter is not alone. Facebook is proving to be a viable base of operations from which to draw attention to the world's most pressing problems. The Causes application alone has 17.5 million monthly active users and has helped raise $4.5 million for approximately 155,000 non-profits. LeapFish , a newly launched real-time and social search engine, is joining the movement. It has teamed up with the Make-a-Wish Foundation to empower Twitter users with the ability to grant an ill child's dream to go to Disneyland. The Tweet-a-Cause, which hit the wires last week and runs until November 27th, is steadily climbing through the twittersphere. This particular campaign is devoted to four-year-old Jacob, who has a rare and life-threatening disease that has affected him since birth. LeapFish is donating $0.10 per tweet to the Make-a-Wish Foundation until 100,000 tweets have been sent, raising $10,000 and granting Jacob's wish: to take his family to Disneyland for a week. Social media is powerful, and hopefully causes such as these are only the beginning. Discuss

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Sponsor Post: LeapFish Draws on Power of Social Media for Worthy Cause