Quality is in demand.
Demand Media, a so-called content farm that has suffered from Google’s recent tweaks to its search engine, is now focusing on “premium” content — and is ready to pay more for it.
The company yesterday outlined a plan to boost its eHow.com site, where users go for articles on everything from how to ripen an avocado to how to build a deck.
Demand Media will pay up to $350 for articles to improve the quality of its stories, which should alleviate criticism that the company pays freelancers poorly for irrelevant content.
EHow was among the sites that Google appears to have targeted as “content farms,” which gin up stories that get users to click on links without providing much in the way of useful information.
Google tweaked its algorithm to lower the rankings of such sites, and Demand Media said in its first-quarter earnings report on Thursday that the change cut eHow’s traffic by about 20 percent.
“Longer feature articles monetize better, and we hope they garner additional traffic because they’ll become more viral,” Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt told the Post yesterday.
Demand’s stock got a boost from the plan, rising 3.25 percent yesterday to close at $16.84 after jumping as much as 17 percent earlier in the day.
Revenue at the company jumped almost 50 percent, to $76.3 million, in the first quarter. Also, the company said page views would rise by more than 20 percent year-over-year this quarter despite Google’s punitive search algorithm.