The Tweetgeist: Demand Media, the Google vampire, ramen news

#piecework: supply and Demand Media

On Vanity Fair's website, Matt Pressman's post, "Demand Media's Plan to Sell Content to Old-Media Fatties," stirs a roiling pot of resentment:

Demand pays roughly $15 for an original, well-written and researched 500-word article. That’s three cents per word, about one-tenth of what a writer would get from a frugal magazine or newspaper. Nevertheless, media professionals are signing up in droves, according to Steven Kydd, Demand Media’s executive vice president in charge of content.

It was actually two days before that Alan Mutter posted his "Stop the exploitation of journalists" -- which called on journalists "to stand together...to reassert the stature of their profession" because "If they don’t put a value on what they do, then no one else will, either." But Mutter's Newsosaur post read like a pre-buttal to the Demand Media story.

Meanwhile, Andrew Keen tweets:

@ajkeen Slave labor rates? Demand Media pays $15 for "an original, well-written and researched" 500 word piece http://bit.ly/9HjX3h what generosity

@ajkeen say a 500 word piece takes 5 hours to research/write. That's $3 an hour rates from Demand Media http://bit.ly/9HjX3h what is minimum wage?

And CW Anderson calls for deeper digging on the topic:

@chanders There has got to be an intelligent way to *study* Demand Media that goes beyond blogging about them. http://bit.ly/cA2o4A.

@chanders For instance, do a well designed, large content analysis of what Demand Media are writing. Or do a social network map of their distro.

#google: The vampire talks back

Earlier this week, Mark Cuban attacked Google as a vampire and urged publishers to "show some balls" and cut Google off. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch responds with "He Calls Google A Vampire, But Mark Cuban’s Mahalo Is Doing The Sucking" -- pointing out that the billionaire investor has a stake in Mahalo, a company whose chief source of revenue is...ads from Google.

Counterpoint to the Cuban bluster: In "Google News to Publishers: Let's Make Love Not War", MediaShift's Mark Glaser sits down for a conversation with two Google news executives, who describe their relationship with publishes as "symbiotic." Rather than, you know, blood-sucking.

At Nieman Lab, Seth Lewis asks "Is online news just ramen noodles? and tried to outline "what media economics research can teach us about valuing paid content." Lewis cites a study that finds that, "Even as audiences transition from TV/print news consumption to the web, they still like the traditional formats better for getting news, all other things being equal":

The key here is to recognize that consumers are rapidly adopting online news not necessarily because they prefer the medium to print, but because online news is “good enough.”

Which evoked this from Dave Winer:

@davewiner Wishful thinking from a pro-journo who dreams of turning the clock back 25 years.

Over at PaidContent, Ben Elowitz offers a marketing perspective on the New York Times' metered plan, and finds more to like than many other observers, but cautions:

In the end, the challenge for the New York Times is not about consumer-payment mechanisms. The real challenge is to build something so great that consumers fall in love—and their credit card will be the surest sign of their devotion.

Facebook as news source?

A post from Hitwise puts some numbers behind a recent post by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb suggesting that "Facebook could become the world's largest news reader." But caution: "reader" here means, specifically, "reader of RSS feeds," though Hitwise goes on to say, "Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media category."

The Hitwise number that headlines and tweeters jumped on was the one that showed "Facebook already drives 350 times as much traffic to other websites in the "news and media" category (3.5%) as Google Reader does (.01%)." But Kirkpatrick takes the analysis deeper:

Facebook, Google News (1.4%). and Google Reader together account for less than 5% of news sites' total traffic. The #1, 2 and 3 drivers of traffic to news sites? Google, Yahoo and MSN - portals and search engines where the editorial judgement is made by centralized algorithms and powerful front-page editors.

Tweets and posts of note

• John McIntyre lays out some first principles of journalism.

• In the Financial Times, Jon Zittrain sounds an alarm about Apple's closed-system designs.

• New numbers from Pew suggest that blogging has lost its luster among younger users while continuing to grow among the older set.

• Kevin Sablan raises his eyebrows at a TechCrunch prediction from 2006:

  @ksablan From 2006: "sites like Digg are going to fundamentally change the way news is consumed" Has that prediction come true? http://bit.ly/cHSxhM

• In response to a New York Times op-ed from a former Microsoft exec detailing how the corporation stifles innovation:

  @yelvington Every behavior that's killing Microsoft, I've seen at a newspaper company. http://bit.ly/9W30W8