Word: contention
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...reason for my nighttime writing adventure was to see what life is like on a massive content farm. I was working for Demand Media, the content-provider start-up that has quickly become the Web's least understood and most vilified juggernaut. The company has come up with a ruthlessly efficient way to churn out stories it knows will be profitable online. The topics may seem bizarre, but the method, though controversial, is unquestionably a success. (See the best social networking applications...
...likely read some of Demand's content without realizing it. Founded in 2006, the company runs a slew of popular Internet portals, including eHow.com Cracked.com and Livestrong.com that receive 100 million hits a month - more traffic than any of the digital properties of Disney, NBC, ESPN or, yes, Time Inc. The company, based in Santa Monica, Calif., is also directing an army of freelancers to write stories that appear in traditional media outlets, most notably in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's weekly travel section, and a Demand executive says more deals with large off-line brands will be announced soon...
...Rosenblatt says he learned from his experience with social networks that there were plenty of people producing reams of data online. "But only 1% of that was relevant to more than just people's friends," he says. "What if we could find a way to find those content creators, tell them what to write and create a broader audience...
...business model that starts with mountains of user-behavior data, culled from search engines, YouTube and Demand's websites. To make money, the company also needed to factor in advertising data and figure out which keywords are the most lucrative to create content around. All this gets fed into an algorithm that spits out only the most-in-demand story ideas, no human guesswork required. Sometimes the results make sense ("Nightlife in Paris," for example), but the computer often generates cryptic or oddly specific titles as well, like "How to Start a Lace-Wig Business in Maryland...
...powerful food and drink lobbies and their allies in the European Parliament aren't quite so sure. Renate Sommer, a parliamentarian from Germany's Christian Democratic Union party, favors limiting front-of-package labeling to calorie content and allowing food companies to decide how much nutritional information to list on the back. "It would be wrong to overload consumers. Otherwise you would need a calculator to work out your diet," she says. "The more you label, the less people read. The U.S. has more and more food labeling, but obesity rates keep rising. We should learn from their mistakes...