English Unlimited HTL 4/5, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM

113 Knowledge and technology 09 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE EXTRAS Demand Media is an online company which aims to answer the general public’s most burning questions on their websites. What kind of questions do you think people might ask? Read the article below. Do you think the statements are true (T) or false (F)? Write the first four words of the sentence which supports your decision in your exercise book. 1 Christian Muñoz-Donoso works for Demand Media . 2 There are thousands of people doing similar work. 3 They all work to a high professional standard. 4 Demand Media finds out what people want to know by tracking internet search data. 5 They employ highly trained staff to interpret the data. 6 Demand Media are successful because they can find out what people really want to know. REaDIng 18 how to how to get rich how to find love how to do the funky chicken how to repair your motorbike how to get the job of your dreams how to play chess like a grandmaster a 19 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. Muñoz-Donoso has enlisted a local instructor to meet him and to bring along four of his boats. Muñoz-Donoso 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 single- mindedly 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 English- language 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. Delivering a confident message Compare your answers in pairs. What does the writer think of Demand Media’s approach? What adjectives reveal his attitude? b c Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Ei entum des Verlags öbv