Demand Media shared with WebProNews, some further insights into its content strategy on the video side of things. In light of the recent discussions surrounding Google’s Panda update, and its impacts on YouTube and Demand Media, we thought it would be worth taking a closer look at the relationship these enormous web entities have with one another.
YouTube was a clear winner (along with other Google properties and other video sites) after the Panda update. Various Demand Media properties were impacted negatively, and the company announced last week that its flagship eHow property experienced a 20% decline in search referrals following the update. It’s interesting that YouTube would go up, and eHow would go down, considering that earlier this year (as the company’s IPO approached), Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt told All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka, “We’re the largest supplier of all video to YouTube, over two billion views…”
Quinn Daly, Demand Media’s SVP, Corporate Communications, tells WebProNews that while it is Demand Media (not just eHow) that is the biggest supplier of video to YouTube, it is the company’s Expert Village brand that has the largest number of videos from Demand Media on YouTube.
Of course the Expert Village brand has been rolled into eHow. If you go to ExpertVillage.com, you’ll be greeted with an eHow header, and the following message:
Liked Expert Village? You’re gonna love eHow.
All of the Expert Village videos you’ve come to count on now live at eHow.com – and that’s only the beginning. With two million articles and videos, plus a supportive community, eHow empowers you with the kind of help and advice you need to accomplish your goals each day.
On the Expert Village YouTube channel, it shows 1,898,439,921 total upload views. The eHow channel boasts 112,350,956 total upload views. Based on my own experiences, eHow-branded videos seem to appear more frequently in Google search results. This is just an observation, however, and is inconclusive.
Last week, Demand Media held its quarterly earnings call, and announced some new clean-up efforts around its content strategy, and eHow in particular. These efforts include the deletion of some articles, and further editing of others. This content comes from Demand Media’s writers’ compensation program, a user-generated content effort, which the company has now completely shut down. Much of this content is/was on eHow.
Given that Demand Media is the biggest supplier of video to YouTube, and that Google has taken some criticism on how YouTube has performed following the Panda update (criticism namely from HubPage CEO Paul Edmondson), we wondered if Demand Media was pulling any videos in these new efforts.
Daly tells us, “The efforts around UGC content on eHow.com were primarily articles. There was a short time that people could also upload videos as well but we removed that function. None of that UGC content was distributed on YT.”
“There are no UGC videos from the WCP program on YT; so in that context, there is no content coming down,” she says. “That said, the body of work on YT is always changing; we are adding new video and working to review older content that may no longer meet our quality standards, so I can’t say that there will be NO content coming down from YT because that wouldn’t be accurate.”
YouTube recently dropped an interesting stat, in that 30% of YouTube videos make up 99% of views. Edmondson is bringing Google’s competitive practices into the Panda conversation, at a time when Google faces regulatory scrutiny over them.