Growing Demand Blog

If you are a frequent reader of our blog you are aware of Demand Media’s successful partnership with YouTube.  It has been so successful in fact that we were recently named YouTube’s first-ever “Partner Success Story”.

But the real success story took place last week far from the offices of Demand Media or YouTube – but instead in the home of Marc and Jo Stephens in Cornwall, England.  Mr. Stephens, an engineer by trade, delivered his baby son Gabriel after watching one of our Expert Village instructional videos on YouTube http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8028625.stm.  The story spread like wildfire over the past few days and has been a perfect feel-good story to distract us from the Swine Flu pandemic.

I think the story struck a chord with people for a variety of reasons, but it certainly demonstrates how mainstream the Internet has become in our daily lives.  Google's mission is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”.  At Demand Media, we want to PUBLISH the world’s information – even long-tail topics like Mr. Stephen’s search for “how to deliver a baby in a car”.

How do we create this content?

Thru our innovative Demand Studios platform, we recruit talented experts to share their knowledge and expertise.  The “star” of the video Mr. Stephens found helpful is Laurie Fremgen, owner of Austin Midwifery Services, in Austin Texas.  Laurie was one of our first Experts back in 2006 when Expert Village was a hungry start-up.  While our production process and quality of our videos has DRAMATICALLY improved since those early days (all our videos are now shot in HD), what hasn’t changed is the value the Expert plays in the process. 

At DemandStudios, we built a “Social Publishing Ecosystem” where all parties involved in the production, distribution, and monetization of the video receive some benefit:

Consumers:  Marc Stephens certainly found some valuable information at the time he needed it: He told the BBC "The videos gave me peace of mind. I think I would have coped, but watching videos made things much easier."

Experts: Laurie Fremgen’s video on YouTube was viewed over 200,000 times and featured her name, bio, and contact information. This type of global exposure for a small business is invaluable in publicly establishing her professional reputation, extend her brand online, and potentially generating leads for her small business.

Filmmaker: The guy behind the camera that day in 1996 was a recent film school graduate who was looking for freelance work to build his resume.  Ultimately became an employee at Demand Media and Jay Holzer is now the Director of our Filmmaker Program.

Publishers:  While YouTube certainly enjoys the PR behind a story like this, they also like having partners like Demand Media who create high-quality content at scale to fuel their advertising business.

Of course, Demand Media benefits by earning a revenue share from advertising on YouTube’s site.  As a profitable company, that is very important to us.  But equally important, this is a perfect example of our Social Publishing Ecosystem at work.  Everyday people getting their questions answered.  And lest you think this is a one-hit-wonder, the Expert Village channel is the 3^rd most viewed channel in history on Youtube with over 500,000,000 views to date.  That means millions of people like Mr. Stephens are seeking knowledge everyday – and we are helping deliver valuable knowledge when it is needed most.  I like to think we “delivered” in a great way for the Stephens family.

Steven  Kydd is Demand Media’s Executive Vice President of Demand Studios . Follow Steven at http://www.twitter.com/skydd