Demand Media: eHow Not Affected By Recent Google Update

Demand Media released its Q3 earnings report today, including a 25% revenue increase. Also in the report, it said that eHow.com is a top 20 site in the U.S., and had 71.5 million unique users worldwid...
Demand Media: eHow Not Affected By Recent Google Update
Written by Chris Crum
  • Demand Media released its Q3 earnings report today, including a 25% revenue increase. Also in the report, it said that eHow.com is a top 20 site in the U.S., and had 71.5 million unique users worldwide in September.

    On the earnings call, CEO Richard Rosenblatt ran down the latest on the company’s strategy, which of course consists of various content properties, social platforms, advertising and a domain registrar service. The company’s sites get 95 million uniques, he said.

    “ehow was not affected,” by Google’s most recent freshness-related algorithm, he said.

    You may recall that earlier this year, the company launched a content clean-up initiative for eHow. On the last quarter’s earnings call, the company reported that it had deleted about 300,000 eHow articles in addition to implementing its feedback tools and launching various partnerships.

    There was no update on the number of articles deleted as of today, but he did say they are continuing to take more steps to improve content quality, including evolving Demand Studios (the content creation platform), increasing the variety of content (with a wider breadth of topics), new formats (such as photo-driven articles), rigorous fact checking, improved content recommendations, and applying things learned from its other content properties like LiveStrong and Cracked (which tend to have better reputations than eHow) to eHow itself. This means taking select passion areas and tapping different kinds of content formats.

    He said they’re reducing the volume of new text content by over 50%. That’s in line with the recent (controversial) reduction in article assignments the company announced.

    Rosenblatt also noted that they’re looking at expanding more internationally, adding that in the last two months, they launched eHow en Espanol and eHow Brazil.

    The subject of that recent traffic glitch did come up. Rosenblatt reiterated that this was just a temporary technical server-related glitch that shouldn’t happen again. Everything was recovered.

    The company has also emphasized its growing investment in video, including new YouTube channels, which they’ll start launching content for in early 2012.

    About 33% of Q3’s revenue came from Google.

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