Demand Media: Everything Looking Good For eHow After Deleting 600K Articles

As previously reported, Demand Media released its Q1 earnings report today, beating estimates. During the company’s last earnings call, the company indicated that eHow had not been impacted by a Google algorithm change since July. It would appear that this has remained the case, through Q1.

CEO Richard Rosenblatt discussed eHow’s progress during the company’s earnings call.

It was the second quarter in a row in which eHow saw revenue growth. The company’s free cash flow was also greatly impacted (increased by $11.8 million YoY) by the company’s decreased content spend on eHow.

He said they have removed over 600,000 pieces of low quality content, while adding additional higher quality content. The company had indicated in the past that it deleted 300,000 articles, so clearly this is a substantial decrease in content.

Rosenblatt also made another interesting comment, seemingly implying that the “clean-up” process may evolve to finding other uses for some of the content. He said they may remove some content form the site and put it elsewhere where it can still generate revenue. This is apparently for things that are too similar to other existing articles on the property, rather than necessarily low quality content.

With regards to the content that has already been deleted, he said, “We just wanted to take that one broad stroke and show that we could clean it up.”

Other improvements included: redesigning article pages, increasing the number of image rich pages, creating high quality video content, incorporating high production value video content from the YouTube channel and launching eHow spark, a social product. eHow Spark users, he said, generate three times the page views of typical eHow users.

eHow’s mobile audience, he said, grew by 29%. He also said they’re increasing their efforts in mobile monetization.

The company has been tweeting out various stats as well:

That’s the company as a whole – not just eHow, by the way, but eHow is obviously a huge part of it.

Another interesting point brought out by Rosenblatt during the Q&A portion of the call: monetization on the iPad is the same or better than the deskop for eHow.

It’s also clear that mobile is a major focus. Rosenblatt says people would rather consume the content on mobile, for eHow’s cooking/fixing things-type videos.