Slight adjustment to Rosenblatt’s slide on Quality, thanks to forum member i_smell:
How to Flush Out Quality
This is the third part of three blog articles (Part 2, Part 1) about the quality of content delivered by Demand Media. First let me explain how topics are actually chosen for a piece of content on a Demand Media website.
Every piece of content that Demand Media publishes starts with a title.
The title team is responsible for taking a steaming mess of a search and turning it into an assignment. The titles appear to be largely generated by farming of searches done within eHow and via domains parked on eNom. Demand also appears to scrape certain technical sites for titles. A non-trivial percentage of the queries clearly come from children working on school assignments and people suffering various maladies.
Topic Quality
- Consumer Demand
- Advertiser Value
- Topic Relevance
Rosenblatt actually conflates site traffic with quality. His argument is that since people are showing up, the content is high quality. It could also just signify a superior job of appearing near the top of Google searches.
Why not measure how long visitors remain onsite before they flee in exasperation? They call it a bounce rate in the industry. The rumor is that over 99% of eHow’s visitors bounce in under a minute. Demand conveniently fails to divulge their bounce stats in the roadshow or the SEC filings. I doubt the numbers are flattering.
Most eHow advertisers are being delivered through Google’s ad network, so do they really have any say regarding the quality of the content they appear alongside? Where are the advertisers clamoring to post ads directly on eHow without Google?
The high quality of topic relevance must be why we see: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten different articles on the scintillating and über-complicated topic of peeling a hard boiled egg?
Creator Quality
- Professional Experience
- Verified Skill and Subject Matter Expertise
- Ongoing Training and Mentoring from In-house Editorial Team
I was in a fraternity in college. Fraternity pledges were tasked with checking the IDs of party guests to screen for underage drinkers. Everyone with a passable ID was allowed entry. You get my drift? There is minimal verification of skills or subject matter expertise coming from within Demand Media. This is largely lip service.
Training and mentoring are an inside joke among freelancers. Any training and/or mentoring that is of any real value tends to be meted out in such rare instances as to be generally inapplicable to almost everyone.
- Shouldn’t you expect to find a lawyer (or paralegal) offering legal advice, or this work of art that flies in the face of legal precedent?
- Would an expert assert a piece of technology requires software, while the technology creator says basically that eHow article is all wet?
- Would a subject matter expert refer to a vehicle by the wrong name?
Quality Process
- Standards Enforcement
- Thorough Editorial Review
- Technology-assisted Review and Workflow
The number of people involved in creating a piece of Demand’s content can range anywhere from 11 to 14, and Rosenblatt actually claims that this wide number of eyeballs signifies quality. Many of those people are paid exactly two cents for their participation. How much quality do you think $.02 actually buys?
I suspect many freelancers do their best in a bad situation, but the process often stands in the way of jettisoning problems before they become even bigger problems. Poor titles pass through and congregate at the bottom of the writing pool like sediment. Every so often, Demand cuts off the supply of titles available to writers in an effort to shake loose the decay.
Would you expect to see unsafe, false, and misleading articles delivered by a process that emphasizes quality? Wouldn’t an expert writer know better? Shouldn’t the expert gatekeepers have caught those errors?
Quality Standards
- Internal Standards
- Partner / Customer Standards
- Mainstream Consumer Standards
The content standards are alarmingly low. They are also enforced unevenly. The copy editors, for the princely sum of $3.50 per title, are tasked with not only proofing and editing copy and checking facts but also with gatekeeping. A lot of these gatekeeper copy editors lack subject matter expertise in the areas they are editing. Even if the writers are experts, the CEs often are not.
In many cases you have the inexpert misleading the ignorant.
That leads to such work as …
One of the worst articles ever to grace eHow — you would think that infant health would get the attention to quality it deserves.
This technology gem from eHow leads us through generic instructions that are basically useless and factually untrue in the end.
It is not really my intent to call out particular articles on eHow as dreck. I’d prefer to call out the entire concept of quality at eHow. The process and the pay scale encourage slapdash and inaccurate work. Richie, it’s not because you’re doing it at scale that the quality suffers. It’s because you pay for shit!!
When I was in college, after closing time we used to go to this place that sold chicken biscuits. They pulled the breasts off the bones for the biscuits and then sold us a bucket of bones for something like a dollar. It was actually a bargain, if you can stomach gristle and gnawing on chicken bones. It was usually all that I could afford at that hour, and it was just slightly better than nothing. That bucket of bones is eHow.
Buy the oats before they go through the horse.
” Content farms have done one thing right: followed the consumer thirst for information. What they have created in response, however, fails to satisfy. A better approach would be to use a similar demand-driven model, but to invest in knowledgeable writers who create quality content that can truly fulfill what readers seek. “
To do that, the execs and insiders would have to sacrifice either margins or a piece of the pie. Don’t expect either, when stretching the truth will suffice.
It kills me to have to write for these bastards, but I have bills to pay. Paying opportunities for freelance writers who don’t sleep with or are related to editors of print publications are nil, except for the web. If anyone knows of a site that pays just as well as DS, please let us all know!
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I like the thought behind the quote from Tom Gerace, but take it with a grain of salt — he owns Skyword, a content mill that pays substantially less than DS and involves even less vetting of writers. It’s rather disingenuous of him to talk about how content farms should pay more for quality writers when he doesn’t practice what he preaches.
When I applied for writing sites within Skyword, I was accepted within an hour to every program; the vetting process must be minimal, if they have one at all. 2 of the programs pay only in revenue share, while 2 pays upfront ($10) plus revenue share (and have less than 100 topics available at any given time). One of the programs, Gather News, only lets you earn revenue for a month — after that, you earn nothing even if the article keeps earning.
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