Writers are angry. Very angry. Why? They don’t like the company Demand Media Studios, and they are very open about sharing their frustration.

What is Demand Media? They’re the biggest “content farm” out there. They are behind websites such as eHow and LiveStrong. They’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Their business strategy has been relatively simple: Produce articles that show up in search engines.

How does that work? They hire thousands of writers to quickly create articles based on “keywords” that people search for in search engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo Search.

This company seems to make some writers very angry. We recently wrote a “success guide” to Demand Media. Here’s what one subscriber wrote to us in response:

This site is bull sh*t, I wish to receive no more mails from your sorry Ars* people!

This reaction was not the only negative criticism we received about this company. Here’s what another writer wrote to us:

I tried writing through Demand and became frustrated very early on. Just about every article I turned in was sent back for revision because they were not meeting Demand’s strict criteria. There are strict guidelines that have to be followed by the letter or your writing will be rejected. When I tried to talk to them, they were rude.

This company seems to hit the hot-buttons of a lot of writers. In fact, at Freedom With Writing, we have  our own opinions about this company. First of all, despite the stringent guidelines they seem to have, we think they are lowering the overall quality of content on the internet. Publishers should continually strive to support their writers, and to increase the quality of their offerings. Demand Media’s strategy is to “blast” the internet with “content” in the hopes that one of those articles will land in front of you.

We see the word “content” all around the Internet these days. The typical goal of “content” is not to educate readers but to be filler that goes in between advertisements. The new media companies that are promoting “content” are not interested in many of the ideals that old media companies had. They think of themselves as advertising delivery platforms.

It is not surprising that companies such as Demand Media respect their writers as little as they respect their content.

That being said it might still be worth many writers time to work with Demand Media. One should not go into the situation completely blind to the reality. However, there is money to be made and valuable skills that you can learn. Knowing the reality of the situation can make it a lot easier to navigate the dangers of working with this company.