What It’s Like To Write For Demand Media: Low Pay But Lots of Freedom

Editor: This is a guest post by Andria Krewson, a freelance journalist who has written for Demand Media. Given our recent focus on Demand Media and so-called content farms, we thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of a Demand Media writer.

I made $37.50 at Demand Studios in November. That money went directly into my Paypal account, on time, with no billing hassles. But it probably took me about six hours of filling out a profile, studying a style guide and learning how to navigate the system. So my hourly pay was about $6, for a writer new to the system.

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Andria Krewson is a freelance journalist and consultant in Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at newspapers for 27 years, focusing on design and editing of community publications. She blogs for her neighborhood at Under Oak and covers changing culture at Crossroads Charlotte. Reach her on Twitter as @underoak.

I had heard about Demand Studios from former co-workers before Wired wrote about Demand Media (Demand Studio's parent company) in October, and media pundits like Jay Rosen followed up with comments on Twitter and an interview with the company's CEO at ReadWriteWeb. [Ed: ReadWriteWeb's first analysis of Demand Media was in August.] Demand Media has been criticized for producing low-quality content designed for search engine optimization. It's not journalism, critics say, and it's clogging up Google searches, making good stuff hard to find.

But I suspect much of that criticism has come from people who haven't gone inside the Demand Studios part of Demand Media to see how it really works, or they haven't thought enough about what kind of content it provides, or they haven't thought enough about how it feels to swallow your pride and make a little money with your strongest knowledge and skills, no matter the global hourly rate.

There are differences between the user-generated content at sites Demand Media feeds, and the content generated by Demand Studios.

So let's get to it.

How it works

People sign up as writers, editors or filmmakers. I signed up as a writer. Contributors study the style guide, which gives specifics on allowed citations, and why citations are needed, and how to write for search-engine optimization without sounding too clunky. New writers can also consult forums and connect with other contributors with social-networking tools. Writers can then use keywords, pay rates and general content areas to search through available assignments. Generally, enough assignments exist that writers can find subjects of personal interest.

Fact sheets get $7.50 an assignment. I fulfilled one of those before I realized that rate of pay wasn't worth the effort. The next two assignments, for $15 each, both dealt with the same topic, with slightly different angles, and I chose them because I knew the subject well. Still, I had to do some research, to back up my statements and provide links to .edu or .gov sites. No Wikipedia allowed.

Once accepting assignments, I had a week to submit them to editors. While I could have written each piece without any research, citations and outbound links are required, as well as a summary (a nut graf, essentially, in newspaper terms). Frankly, the discipline of filling out boxes with words could help some professional writers improve the focus of their pieces. Certainly new writers can learn from the system. And the SEO tips in the style guide are worth study.

One piece I wrote was bounced back for further editing. The editor's comments were gentle but clear. I made fixes, resubmitted, and got paid, through Paypal, no invoices necessary.

What's the content?

The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They're evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now. They're the kinds of questions I would usually get answered through a phone call to my contractor father, or my brother the car genius, or my mother the seamstress/cook/homemaker/gardener/early computer geek.

You can tell by the assignment headlines that they're generated from search engine queries, and sometimes those search terms provide some amusement. People are actually turning to Google to ask these questions? What happened to asking basic questions from friends and family?

But indeed, we're in a different world, and the criticism of Demand Media by some pundits strikes me as a bit elitist, as if the Internet weren't for everyone. A personal example:

(Daughter, 19, volunteers to help me with my eye shadow for a special event.)

Me: Where'd you learn this technique?

Her: Youtube.

(And indeed, eHow videos, supplied by Demand Media, show how to apply eye shadow.)

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