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It’s been a busy week for premiere content farm Demand Media, as the company has renewed its advertising deal with Google for a period of three years and acquired both RSS Graffiti and IndieClick to serve up ads to more than 200 sites.
Perhaps most interestingly, the company- which provides content via a broad network of writers for the sites Livestrong, eHow, and Cracked among others- drilled down on the Spanish-speaking on-demand writing space with the acquisition of Argentinian content farm Emerging Cast. The Emerging Cast site has already been branded under the Demand Media umbrella, and announces on the front page the ongoing transition as the company becomes Demand Media Studios En Español.
A translation of the site reveals this message describing the effects of the acquisition:
In the coming weeks and months, we will provide opportunities for writers, editors and professional translators with perfect mastery of reading and writing in Spanish to work with some of the biggest brands on the web, [to serve] to people who speak Spanish [all over] the world.
Web chatter about Emerging Cast indicates that the company has come in for many of the same criticisms levied by disgruntled Demand Media writers in the US market- low pay, unreasonable edits and a high rejection rate for completed content. However, at least until recently, Emerging Cast also offered far less frequent payouts to content creators- monthly instead of Demand Media’s bi-weekly pay cycle- as well as far lower rates for posts, at as little as $1-2 per article and less than 20% of standard Demand Media rates. It was not disclosed whether these aspects of freelancer agreements would become more favorable under the terms of the deal.
eHow Español will launch in beta this month, but other terms of the deal were not made public.
