"“I call them the Henry Ford of online video,” says Jordan Hoffner, director of content partnerships at YouTube. Media companies like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AOL, and USA Today have either hired Demand or studied its innovations. This year, the privately held Demand is expected to bring in about $200 million in revenue; its most recent round of financing by blue-chip investors valued the company at $1 billion. In this industrial model of content creation, Muñoz-Donoso is working the conveyor belt — being paid very little for cranking out an endless supply of material. He admits that the results are not particularly rewarding, but work is work, and Demand’s is steady and pays on time. Plus, he says, “this is the future.” He has shot more than 40,000 videos for Demand, filming yo-yo whizzes, pole dancers, and fly fishermen. But ask him to pick a favorite and he’s stumped. “I can’t really remember most of them,” he says." - Brad Williamson from Bookmarklet

SHOCKINGLY SAD NEWS FOR MANY CONTENT CREATORS. - Brad Williamson

I think this is brilliant -- really. What's not to like? - Sean McBride

"Before Reese came up with his formula, Demand Media operated in the traditional way. Contributors suggested articles or videos they wanted to create. Editors, trained in the ways of search engine optimization, would approve or deny each while also coming up with their own ideas. The process worked fine. But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula." - Sean McBride

So are they the ones to blame for the increasingly weak search results at Google and Yahoo? The top results have been SEO'd into irrelevance. I no longer look at top 30 for my personal searches, unless its branded content I am explicitly looking for - like Fedex locations. At least half the time, rich content is buried in the Second Hundred (what I call result pages after 100). Smart content providers are devising strategies right now to place branded content high and deeper content in the middle. - Cole Jolley

Cole -- I would have to see some examples of what you are referring to. Usually I seem to find what I'm looking for in the top 5 results of a Google search. - Sean McBride