Demand Media — what happens with it now?

Yesterday, I wrote my latest blog post about the "serfs" at HuffPost becoming part of AOL and a likely even bigger pile of serfdom, and how that might affect other SEO serfs? What got me started?

I wondered whether Examiner serfs get irritated, apprehensive and anxious to see your parent company advertising all the time for YET MORE WRITERS on Monster and Career Builder.

I asked:

People who would like to use the Internet with less spam: Doesn't the oncoming SEO deluge worry you? What next — "Examiners" from India? The Philippines? Any place where English has reasonable standing as a second language?

Well, what about Demand Media? Is Demand going to be in better shape, since it pays on piecework rather than article hits?

I still can't see how payment is going to go anywhere but down.

The NYT has a good overview on SEO websites and writing for them here. Demand is mentioned in the same breath as some others.

Now, some recent Demand news to indicate why I think it won't be too likely to rise above the SEO crowd.

1. Demand gets spammed ... one of its writers somehow made $7K per month writing articles too shoddy for it, with made-up sources, etc. The person probably was busted only due to the egregiousness of the violations. Some Demand higher-up saw some financials and said, "WTF? There's no way this person could make that much money on our system."

2. A Demand writer exposes its lack of quality control.

Re eHow:

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?

That's why so much content is recycled.

3. Demand also supplied content to corporate blogs — wonder how much it charges for this and how much SEO spamming that generates. Is this increasing or decreasing? How worried should we be about this?

Besides SEO spamming, will the AOLs of the world also do more and more link mining? JC Penney did, and until busted by Google, appears to have profited nicely.

As for my claims that we're due for a tech bubble bursting, CNN has a story on how Demand Media was able to raise $151M in an IPO despite losing nearly $10M last year, $22M in 2009, and countless millions in the years before. It's crazy; these companies are overvalued and someday the piper will be paid.

As for me? Yes, I make a few bucks off the Google ads, and a few bucks off click-throughs. Not much, but it could be more if serf-spammers who write about crap, rather than people who write about ideas and issues, weren't so prevalent on the Net.

But, I started this blog before I was offered the chance for click-through money and before I looked at activating AdSense, which I don't think was even available to me then.