Demand Media Studios Review and Writers Compensation Program (WCP)

I wanted to write a comprehensive review of my experience with Demand Media Studios for those freelance writers out there who are researching websites to publish there articles from. I am a legacy ehow.com writer who had a semi-profitable experience posting articles on the ehow website. I was happy with the service that ehow offered its writers, and the compensation they provided was more than fair for the articles I wrote. However my brief experiences writing for Demand Studios left me unhappy, and ultimately led me to the decision to begin writing with Squidoo.

Demand Media Studios is a conglomerate of freelance writing websites who have acquired the likes of Ehow, Livestrong.com, Golflink and several other websites. They are the largest providers of youtube content and look to me to be the gorilla in the room as they are one of the fastest growing freelance writing websites on the internet.

They differ from other freelance websites I have used in the past as they treat the content that writers post very seriously. Being a legacy ehow.com writer, I easily accessed ehow by creating a user account, reviewing the 'how-to' guides they posted online and then I was free to write about what I wanted and how I wanted as long as it was in the template that ehow.com provided. Articles were reviewed after they were posted, and on rare occasions I was asked to modify materials, or if they found material that was erroneous it was flagged and the article was withdrawn.

After Ehow.com merged with Demand studios I realized that the process would change, but I did not realize how drastically it would change. I was grandfathered in as a legacy ehow writer. I was made aware that the typical process for becoming a writer was to submit your application along with a writing sample and resume to demand studios in a quasi-hiring process. I was thankful I did not have to submit to this process as I write articles as a hobby, not as a job.

My first task was to create a biography for myself. I prefer to be as anonymous as possible when I write because I don't want it to interfere with other aspects of my life or work. As no surprise, Demand Studios was not happy with my initial biography draft. They insisted that in order to write for demand studios I must create a more business-like resume with appropriate experiences that catered to my audience. To be honest, I left my biography rewrite on hold for several months and finally conformed to their requests. My next task seemed simple enough. In order to be considered for writing ehow articles that I wanted to post, I needed to submit three writing samples from the list of articles they have in their inventory.

As I searched the inventory under the categories I seemed most familiar with, it was very difficult for a generalist like myself to pick articles such as 'How to Calculate Random Probability' or 'How to make a Cantilever Pergola'. I settled on something I actually had heard of before – 'How to check your Mail from Anywhere'. There was no other direction given. You are given one week to write your article before you lose your 'claim' on it. Once I submitted my article on-time it came back to me within 24 hours for revisions. The process seemed to time consuming for me, so I decided to let my claim on the article lapse and for now I have switched to writing on Squidoo.

Demand Media Studios is a force to be reckoned with. They treat their online presence like a well-run business. This will not work well with part-time writers such as myself who do this for additional income, but more importantly to write about what they want and how they want. Demand Media puts this process of applications and checks and balances in place to weed out the freelancers who don't want to treat their articles like a business or don't have the time to. I think they have a great process in place to attract the best freelancers our there who will create some of the best web content on the internet, however this is not the direction I can go in at this time. If you are a part-time writer like myself it will be hard to comply with their strict standards. This review is not a slight at Demand Studios, I would say I look admirably at them for the content they provide and the system they enforce to find the best in the business to work for them. Unfortunately I cannot commit to those high standards at this time.