Steven Kydd, head of content at Demand Media, opened the 11th International Online Journalism Symposium in 2010 by acknowledging that his company had not been embraced by the leading lights of new media, and putting that down to disruption. As the largest supplier of video to YouTube, he said, it held five times more data than anyone else about what people watch.
The model he described combined the art of traditional media with the science of the internet. Demand Media produced 5,000 original pieces of content a day across its own sites, and used data to decide what to make before making it: every item had to have an audience, an advertiser and a way of being executed, and the economic value was estimated first. Content is marketing, he said, and each piece had to earn its keep — with quality, he insisted, as the point. He called the process collaborative curation and the writers qualified freelancers: data analysis, then a duplication check, a title, a writer, a plagiarism check, a copy editor and a fact check, then publication, then user comments and ratings fed back in. In the previous 30 days 7,000 freelance writers and 650 copy editors had worked for the company.
Much of the talk was reassurance aimed at a room of journalists and academics: a travel partnership with USA Today, staff with traditional media backgrounds, golf coverage as an example of quality. Investigative journalism was not attempted; the focus was lifestyle. What Demand Media did, Kydd said, was a next step in the evolution of media.