Oh, how Demand Media Studios (DMS) has fallen so badly in the recent months. DMS was once a place where a freelance writer could go to churn out some simple eHow articles and actually make a respectable living. When I say “respectable,” I’m talking anywhere from $15k part-time up to $40k to $50k full-time just writing for eHow. If you also wrote for LIVESTRONG or any other channels, you could easily pull in more than that.
Now, it’s true that people have been saying that Demand Studios sucks for years, but the truth is, a couple years ago it was still a great place to work. The people who were saying DMS sucks a couple years ago were snobby writers who already had high paying gigs and thought getting paid $15 to $25 an article was far beneath them. The average joe, though, who couldn’t land a sweet gig writing for a paper or magazine, realized they were lucky if DMS hired them.
Sure, most of the assignments were nothing you’d want to include on a resume, and although there were hundreds of thousands of available assignments, the bulk of them were impossible to write because they didn’t make any sense; nonetheless, each and ever day, I could login to my account and snag 8 to 10 decent assignments in less than an hour. That was always enough work to make between $120 to $200.
Occasionally, an editor would send you an annoying rewrite request or reject an article for some stupid reason, but it never had a very big impact on your earnings. Sometimes there would be what we call “title draughts” (short periods of little to no assignments) but they never lasted long enough to really hurt you.
Well, this past August we had a title draught, and it was pretty nasty. It lasted longer than any other draught I experience in my two years working for Demand. However, when it bounced back, it bounced back hard. Suddenly there were over 15,000 $20 titles in LIVESTRONG, and… they were good titles (for the most part)! eHow had a respectable amount of decent titles, as well.
I remember thinking, “wow, this is enough work to easily make $200 a day for a long time to come.” I also remember thinking, “… and this seems a little too good to be true.” Well, I was wrong about my first though and right about the latter. Suddenly, without warning, every LIVESTRONG assignment was pulled out of the queue. They told us there was a “glitch” and that titles would return in “2 – 3 days.”
Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. The titles never came back. I was back to writing the lesser-paying eHow titles for the time being, but even those were starting to dwindle down to almost nothing. They kept telling us our jobs were secure and there was nothing to worry about, throwing out phrases, such as, “we’re focusing on improving quality” and “titles will return but in smaller batches.”
Writers were concerned about losing access to the site (getting fired) or losing their permissions to write for certain publishers. DMS kept insisting this wouldn’t happen and no one had anything to worry about. Then one day, after all the assignments for eHow had disappeared, they sent us an email that basically said, in a nice and friendly way, that eHow assignments were never going to return in the figures we were used to seeing. In other words, Demand was basically suggesting eHow writers find work elsewhere.
As if that weren’t bad enough, a week or two later they sent us all an email explaining that writers would now have to maintain a grammar score above 4.0 (which is nearly impossible to maintain) in order to have access to assignments within the first 48 hours they enter the queue. In other words, they made it virtually impossible for any of us to write for them.
No one can afford to spend an entire workday trying to find one assignment to write, and then spend several hours researching and writing that assignment to perfection just for $15. In simplest terms, they fired us without actually firing us. Even worse, they created another secret section for a very small number of writers, giving them first dibs on everything, and then denied the section exist, dismissing it as a “rumor.”
For some reason, Demand Media Studios continues to hire new writers. They most likely do this so that their shareholders think the company is still expanding and doing well so they don’t sell their shares. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention their stock has been plummeting for months.
So, in closing, I am warning you that DMS is a total waste of time now. If you apply to them and get accepted, you will only waste a bunch of your time and completely frustrate yourself. You”ll never be able to find any assignments, you’ll be confused all the time, you’ll get sucked into all the drama in the forums, staff members will ignore your questions, you’ll apply to write for special sections and never get a reply, their staff will constantly lie to you, and ultimately your hopes of making a living writing for them will be crushed.
All of the promotions on Demand’s website still create the illusion that you can earn a full-time income, be treated like a professional, and boost your writing career. It’s all nonsense. They still have a video on their website of some guy talking about how DMS liberated him from his 9 – 5. He even says, “It’s nice to have one main employer i can count on for freelance work.” However, now that it’s impossible to earn a living at Demand Studios, we’re constantly reminded (mostly by other writers, in all fairness) that we are just freelances and we should never rely on one source of income.
Anyways, don’t fall for their marketing gimmicks. They only want new writers to keep up company appearances.