Content Blog

What most people don’t know is that eHow has been around for almost 12 years. Over that time, it has grown into one of the largest libraries of instructional articles and videos. As editorial models like wikis and user-generated content became popular, eHow’s editorial strategy has grown and changed. Now, eHow is made of content from a number of different sources and in various formats, everything from user-generated articles to episodic Web series like Curbside Eats.

Throughout, we’ve been focused on one thing - getting better than we were the day before. Today we announced that we are accelerating the steps to improve user-generated articles on eHow by acquiring full rights to eligible articles and removing a large number of other such articles.  By the end of the quarter we will have complete editorial control over the remaining user-generated articles. Now that we are entering a new phase in our editorial growth, I wanted to give you some background on how we started, what we’ve learned and where we’re going next.

I came to Demand Media in March 2007. We had purchased eHow.com less than a year before. We believed that 'everyone is an expert at something’ and set out to tap into people's knowledge and share it with the rest of the world. As someone with a background in traditional publishing, it was an exciting to open up these writing opportunities to everyone with knowledge on a topic.

We created a tool for eHow members to submit their own articles and we introduced a payment program called the Writer Compensation Program (WCP) that allowed eHow members to get paid for their expertise. We felt that by compensating the writer, they would be invested in the success of the article. We designed a template (with an introduction, step-by-step instructions, tips and warnings) to direct consistent quality, and allowed writers to upload their own photos.

We also took these same concepts and worked with outside editorial companies to produce similar content, but through an editorial process that included making assignments to professional freelance writers. We gave them consistent feedback on the articles, simple stuff like we want to see more of this, and less of that.

We also began to invest heavily in plagiarism software because we knew that, whether we were sharing the revenue or paying for the content outright, we needed clear rights for every article. With this type of long-tail, service journalism article, we sought to understand the true value of content by collecting feedback from the people seeking out the information and understanding how they interacted with it (e.g. reading an article about tire alignment while at the mechanic, before making the decision whether or not to approve the cost). We surrounded the articles with feedback opportunities such as ratings, comments, Facebook likes, etc. If the content was working, we wanted to know why and do more of that. If it wasn’t, well … you get it.

In the end, we realized that there were elements of user-submitted content that we loved, such as the passion and soul it can bring to a topic. We also realized there was so much value in running content through an editorial process that leaned on the writing/research experience of professional freelancers. But, ultimately, both had their own limitations. So, here’s where we landed:

March 2008: We built our own publishing platform, Demand Media Studios, and set out to build our own world-class freelance community. 

November 2008: We purchased our last article from an outside editorial group.

April 2010: We stopped allowing new user-submitted articles on eHow.com. We invited the writers with proven ability to produce quality articles to join Demand Media Studios.

May 2011: We closed down our user-submitted article program on eHow.com and made the decision to either buy the rights to an article and run it through our studio-based editorial process or take it down.

Three Things I Would Have Loved to Know in March 2007

It’s good to have a direct relationship with the writer, the title and the article. We had direct relationships with our eHow writers, but they could write about whatever they wanted without any editorial oversight. Working with outside editorial groups put us in a position to make assignments on specific topics, but we weren’t able to work directly with the writers to improve the content or the writers. We were able to get audience feedback on the articles, but it became less actionable when we couldn’t tie it back to a specific writer.

Beauty (or the true value of the content) is in the eye of the beholder. We’ve always been focused on making sure that the right title is paired with the best writer and copy editor. Subject matter expertise is valuable, but oversight and guidance are key. We now know this, so every writer and copy editor is audited and rated ongoing within our platform. But, we also knew that editorial process can only take you so far in understanding quality. In this wonderful online world, we’ve got more opportunities than ever to solicit feedback on individual articles from the audience it was intended. Gone are the days of the letters mailed to the editor, and welcome to a world of likes, bounce rates, shares, helpful/not helpful and comments.

Keep it simple, and listen. None of this data matters unless you are speaking to the motivations of writers, copy editors, filmmakers and serving the needs of your audience. I still believe one of the biggest problems we solved was one of the most underrated. For every approved step in the process (e.g. copy editor edits and approves an article; title editor makes a grammatical edit to a title), a payment is prompted and that individual gets paid within three days to his PayPal account.

We’ve learned a great deal since those early days of 2007. And we’ve yet to navigate and apply all the knowledge from our user-submitted days and our work with outside editorial teams. What we know to be true – there’s a big, big world of talented writers out there. And the premise of ‘everyone is expert at something’ still holds true. We just needed to find them, give them the right assignments and support them with editorial resources, such as pairing with copy editors who share similar expertise, along the way.