Demand Studios (Demand Media)

» see demandmedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ehow was for english speakers writing for english speakers about US household topics. that was not my crowd. by '09 i was an engineering student in ankara reading english-language tech press, but the ehow category of content (how to unclog a toilet, how to file your US taxes) was an audience i had no overlap with. demand studios was the factory behind ehow and livestrong plus a chain of smaller content sites that produced articles in the same shape on the same template at the same price point.

richard rosenblatt and shawn colo founded demand media in may 2006 in santa monica. the model was a content algorithm that scraped search-query trends to identify topics with commercial intent, then commissioned freelancers at fifteen dollars an article to fill that demand. ehow was the flagship property. by 2011 the company was running thirteen thousand active freelance writers and pulling three hundred twenty five million dollars a year. an ipo in january of that year priced the company at about one and a half billion. for a quarter or two the trajectory looked like an actual business.

the model broke on the same day examiner broke, when google rolled out its panda update on february 23 2011. demand's properties bled traffic. the share price slid through 2012. by '13 the company was hemorrhaging unique visitors and trying to pivot away from the content-farm brand entirely. demand studios was rebadged studiod in 2014, the parent renamed itself leaf group in november 2016, the content-factory shape never came back.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

the demand pipeline ran on a custom cms that handed assignments to freelancers based on a search-trend algorithm. you logged in as a copy editor or a freelance writer. the cms showed you the queue of available articles. the dollar amount was attached. you wrote the piece against a structured template, the editor approved it, the page went live with ads above and below. ehow was the public face but the back end touched dozens of properties. golflink, cracked, livestrong, ehow.uk. each piece cost demand fifteen dollars and made back its money inside a few weeks of search traffic.

~ the cracks ~

panda was the specific event that broke the math. demand's properties had ranked well in google by flooding the long tail with thin content, and panda was designed to downrank exactly that. the search traffic stopped. ad inventory stayed but cpm prices were collapsing across the industry through 2012 and 2013. the company tried higher-quality verticals through the leaf group brand. nothing replaced the content-farm revenue base. demand lost six and a half million dollars in q4 2012. unique visitors dropped fifty six percent year over year by october 2013.

~ the rebrand ~

the leaf group rename in november 2016 was the official funeral for the demand brand. the new company kept the legacy properties and added saatchi art and society6 to look more like a portfolio of premium consumer brands. graham holdings bought ehow and livestrong from leaf group in 2019. by 2026 ehow is still up under newfold digital but reads more like a wikipedia mirror than a content factory. the company that ran the original pipeline does not exist anymore. the writers spread out.

~ the long tail ~

demand studios is the answer to a question that does not get asked often enough. what happens to the writers when a content factory dies? the answer is they take a thirty percent pay cut and move to a different platform that has not been pandafied yet, until that one also breaks. the ehow lessons-learned tier on the open web went through three rebrand cycles before mostly migrating to youtube tutorials. the inheritance of demand media is the slug-and-template structure of about a quarter of the english internet, and the assumption that an article should be twelve paragraphs of five hundred words.

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