Demand Media's angle on new media is to provide content creators the vetting, ideas, channel and money they need to become professional content creators. It provides a direct path to success for talented, hard-working people. As my previous post points out, this is a new path to success. In the traditional, mainstream media, only the elite few really win, while there is (almost) no path to professionalism in user-generated content.
Demand's approach is perfect for those with talent, skills and a desire to work ... but who may not have a paying outlet for their efforts, or a system to structure and focus their work.
One of the things that is particularly interesting about Demand is that it's not a boutique. It's an industrial-scale enterprise, capable of producing far more quality content than the vast majority of content-creating entities today. But unlike traditional publishing empires, it leverages the internet and works on a fully scalable, distributed basis. There is no concern about tapping out on a certain kind of talent within commute distance of "the office," not when the office is the internet. There is workflow, there are defined roles for people to play, there is automation (lots of it), so in that respect, it's very industrial.
"Industrial" can be used as a critical word, but it's also a word that describes a system that is designed to produce a large amount of a desired thing at low cost and with predictable, consistent quality. Back in the 1980's, a whole industry got started to process structured content, the kind you have when you fill out a form, for example. This was when concepts like "automated document processing" and "workflow" began to be implemented, and pioneering companies like FileNet applied industrial templates to massive document handling problems. I personally worked on such an automation effort at Sallie Mae, where even then there were over 40 million documents to be processed per year, with a couple thousand people doing the work -- definitely an industrial problem.
What's fascinating here is that, a couple decades later, Demand Media is leading a similar new wave of document automation. The differences include:
- DM produces documents; before we handled documents received
- DM is highly distributed; most earlier efforts were centralized
- DM deals with unstructured documents; the earlier efforts were directed at structured documents
But the commonalities are striking. In both cases:
- Workflow software is the heart of the industrial engine
- The work is highly structured, with quality measures taken at each step
- The process is scalable to massive volumes
And of course, there is a key new process. In first-generation document processing, we were consuming documents. When you are producing documents, you have to make sure you're producing stuff that people actually want to consume. How the heck do you do that at scale?!
Well, that's part of the magic of Demand Media, and perhaps will be the subject of a future post.
What does this mean to the person who would like to work in professional content creation? It means that Demand Media, by pioneering Professionally Generated Content (see prior post), has a job and value-creation system in which all the participants win. And because its industrial system has been built on a secure foundation (workflow, etc.) with appropriate updates and variations, we can be confident it will continue to scale and work as it does.
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