Compare your answers in pairs. What does the writer think of Demand Media’s approach? What adjectives reveal his attitude? Listen to an interview with the CEO of Demand Media, Richard Rosenblatt. It was conducted shortly after he founded the company, which still exists, but is now called Leaf Group. 1 What information does he give about his company and how it works? 2 How is it different from the way traditional content media worked? 3 What does he mean by “We added a science to the art of creating content”? 4 How would you describe his attitude? Look at these statements from the interview. Which words contribute to the strength of Rosenblatt’s message and make him sound confident? c If Christian Muñoz-Donoso is going to make this job pay, he’s got to move quickly. He has a list of 10 videos to shoot on this warm June morning, for which he’ll earn just $200. To get anything close to his usual rate, he’ll have to do it all in two hours. Today’s topic is kayaking. MuñozDonoso has enlisted a local instructor to meet him and to bring along four of his boats. MuñozDonoso gets most of his shots in one take. But conditions are working against him. Shifting winds and changing light require him to adjust his setup. Even so, within a few hours, he has uploaded his work to Demand Media, his employer for the day. It isn’t Scorsese, but it’s fast, cheap, and good enough. Thousands of other filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, working as freelancers, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day. The company’s ambitions are so enormous as to be almost surreal: to predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results. To get there, Demand is using an army of Muñoz-Donosos to crank out articles and videos. They shoot slapdash instructional videos with titles like ‘How to draw a Greek helmet’ and ‘How to stop snoring’. They pump out an endless stream of bulleted lists and tutorials about the most esoteric of subjects. Plenty of other companies have tried to corner the market in online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and singlemindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers. The process is automatic, random, and endless. It is a database of human needs, and if you haven’t stumbled on a Demand video or article yet on sites like ehow or livestrong, you soon will. By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing a million items a month, the equivalent of four Englishlanguage Wikipedias a year. In an era overwhelmed by FlickrYouTubeWiki pediaBloggerFacebookTwitter-borne logorrhea, it’s hard to argue that the world needs another massive online content company. But what Demand has realised is that the internet gets only half of the simplest economic formula right: It has the supply part down but ignores demand. Give a million monkeys a million WordPress accounts and you still might never get a seven-point tutorial on how to keep wasps away from a swimming pool. Yet, that’s what people want to know. d Listening 10 40 3w66g7 Language focus Sounding confident 11 a “We set out to create a whole new form of content.” 1 “… which we with surety can tell through the science and algorithms, is going to be successful.” 3 “We definitely think that it’s causing people to rethink their business models.” 2 Language skills Extras Explore 9 Technology and science 121 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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