Demand truly mining the web

Normally I’d just post a link to and/or excerpt from this over on my tumblr here, but this is something I wanted to draw more attention to.

It’s all about Demand Media - the link itself is an article in Wired magazine, a profile on the company - a company that decides what video content to produce based on an algorithm that looks at a) demonstrated user demand for specific content, based on search engine and ISP data , b) value of specifically-related keywords - including life-time value not just immediate value, and c) the level (lack of) competition around that specific content.  And then they use a system not unlike Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to actually get the video content made by freelance workers.

Why do I like it? Because both its scale and its core reason for existing is simply something that, before “the internet”, could not have been dreamed up, let alone executed.

But what Demand has realized is that the Internet gets only half of the simplest economic formula right: It has the supply part down but ignores demand. Give a million monkeys a million WordPress accounts and you still might never get a seven-point tutorial on how to keep wasps away from a swimming pool. Yet that’s what people want to know.