Demand Media let software decide what to write. Its algorithms studied what people typed into search engines, and freelancers wrote articles to match, at a few dollars a piece, for sites like eHow. The pages ranked well on Google and carried ads. When the Santa Monica company went public in January 2011, it also ran a large domain name registrar, and investors were betting the content machine could keep growing as fast as the web did.

A Content Factory

Richard Rosenblatt and Shawn Colo started Demand Media in 2006. They bought eHow and other sites, and they bought eNom, a registrar that sold web addresses. The content studio was the bold part. It found questions with steady search traffic and ad value, then assigned them to an army of freelance writers and video makers. The bet was that cheap pages, made in huge numbers and aimed at search, could earn more in ads than they cost to make.

Google Changes the Rules

Demand Media priced at $17 a share, above its $14 to $16 range, and closed its first day on the NYSE at $22.65, up 33 percent. Within weeks Google changed its ranking system to push down low-quality pages, and eHow's traffic suffered. A year after the IPO the stock had fallen about 60 percent. The company spun off its domain business in 2014 and renamed itself Leaf Group in 2016. Graham Holdings bought it in 2021 for $8.50 a share.

Cover: Maple Leaves in Shimosa Province (Shimosa, momiji), section of sheet no. 7 from the series "Cutout Pictures of the Provinces (Kunizukushi harimaze zue)", Utagawa Hiroshige. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for autumn maple leaves (Leaf).