Studio Blog

The Demand Studios Grant Program is proud to award Mr. Dan Antony with a $1,000 grant to aid him in the completion of his book, "Beeg Mec." We enthusiastically anticipate the completion of a fascinating and historically relevant story on the rise of a restaurant and the fall of a government. 

We were incredibly impressed by Dan’s professional grant proposal which included specifics on how he would directly apply his grant money to interviewing key figures of his project.

While this is inherently a subjective process, there are key aspects to your application that will help you stand out. We especially appreciate some detailed thought behind where every dollar might be spent. In addition, we found ourselves leaning towards projects that were already in process. Thank you to everyone for applying and remember we are picking a grant applicant each month. 

You may apply for February's grant starting Monday, February 1st through Sunday, February 7th.

Congratulations, Dan! We are all so proud of you.

Ever wonder what it's like to work for Demand Studios? We checked in with our community of freelance creators—writers, copy editors, filmmakers and titlers—and asked them to share their experiences. Hundreds of people chimed in about why Demand Media works for them. Tune in daily to read their firsthand accounts.




My name is Tim Wood, and I’m a writer and copy editor with Demand Studios. I am a 20-year media veteran and a founding editor of “Bluffton Today,” a free daily. I have spent the last year watching my highly talented peers get axed one-by-one and was determined not to be the next victim. With Demand Studios, I'm the boss. I crave variety and want to be part of the future solution for our business while still being the dad and husband my family deserves. A million “thank yous” for letting me have it all, Demand Studios.

Ever wonder what it's like to work for Demand Studios? We checked in with our community of freelance creators—writers, copy editors, filmmakers and titlers—and asked them to share their experiences. Hundreds of people chimed in about why Demand Media works for them. Tune in daily to read their firsthand accounts.




I'm Dimitri LaBarge, and for more than 20 years, I've dabbled in a little bit of everything, including Web design. What I really wanted was to become a working filmmaker, having written more than 20 unproduced screenplays and directed several short films. Demand Studios offered me the chance to leave my dead-end job for a sustainable income making videos. Even as many filmmakers struggle in this harsh economy, Demand Studios has given me challenging and interesting work opportunities with consistency. With hundreds of videos under my belt, Demand Studios has helped me grow the skills needed to pursue my filmmaking dreams.

Check out this video Dimitri made for eHow: How to Do a Plie Ballet Position

Ever wonder what it's like to work for Demand Studios? We checked in with our community of freelance creators—writers, copy editors, filmmakers and titlers—and asked them to share their experiences. Hundreds of people chimed in about why Demand Media works for them. Tune in daily to read their firsthand accounts.




My name is Libby Wiersema, and I’m a writer and copy editor with Demand Studios. The decision to leave my job at a daily newspaper was grueling—if I was no longer “Libby Wiersema, features editor for the ‘Morning News’”—then who was I? One year later, this is who I've become: “Libby Wiersema, poet, homemaker, cook, traveler—and CE and writer for Demand Studios.” Being able to work from my kitchen, my daughter's house or even a hotel has permitted me to exchange crushing deadlines and office hours for a more authentic life with room for family, artistry, pleasure, contemplation and work. Demand Studios has helped me be available for my own life.

Ever wonder what it's like to work for Demand Studios? We checked in with our community of freelance creators—writers, copy editors, filmmakers and titlers—and asked them to share their experiences. Hundreds of people chimed in about why Demand Media works for them. Tune in daily to read their firsthand accounts.




I'm Laurel Ziemann, a member of the QA Titling team. I am thankful for the opportunity to be part of the Demand Studios family. For the last 18 months, I have been editing several financial websites on a volunteer basis and am glad to have a paying position. I enjoy the electronic communication with team members while learning the production process and preferred style format. I'm also privileged to be working with an excellent caliber of people who respect language and each other. Although electronic, the culture is friendly and team-focused. I enjoy the flexibility of hours and being able to work in my jammies.

Ever wonder what it's like to work for Demand Studios? We checked in with our community of freelance creators—writers, copy editors, filmmakers and titlers—and asked them to share their experiences. Hundreds of people chimed in about why Demand Media works for them. Tune in daily to read their firsthand accounts.




My name is Kandra Sperling. I have 30 years’ experience in journalism and photography. My last job as community editor, writer and photographer for a major daily was a great job, but for personal reasons, I decided to "retire." A bad economy changed everything. My husband's work depends on a good real estate market, which is non-existent these days. Looking for work, I stumbled upon Demand Studios. The flexibility of working for Demand Studios takes away the stress of a full-time job. The ability to work from anywhere in the world gives me freedom, which is the greatest bonus for two photographers who love to travel.

"There is always something to be found if you look for it."
--Anonymous

When I talk to writers and filmmakers who work for Demand Studios—believe it or not, I run into them all the time…in fact, I’m related to one or two—one of the most common questions I’m asked is why the categories of titles are so confusing and often inaccurate.

The simplest explanation is to just say that it isn’t easy to categorize 60,000 titles a day, so our margin of error is a little bit higher than most. But I’ll step out of the way of my pride and admit it, our assignment categorization needs improvement. 

Thankfully for those of you who are concerned enough to be reading this, help is on the way…but before I go into it, I would like to give a little explanation about the task in front of us.

The Essence of Taxonomy
In the Internet era, where entering information into search boxes has become the preferred method of locating information, you can be forgiven if you’ve taken for granted the ability to find what you want in seconds.

At Demand Studios, we need to pair up thousands of assignments with thousands of writers and do it quickly. This requires a comprehensive category taxonomy that is large enough to hold our content without being so big that it becomes a complete nuisance to writers and filmmakers looking to find work. (And btw, the word “taxonomy” has always terrified me. Just say it aloud a couple times and you’ll see what I mean.)

Every title we create, and if you’ve been reading this blog this week you know we’re talking about tens of thousands a day, then needs to be matched with the category that fits the best. Sounds simple, but let me ask, where would you categorize “How to Find a Divorce Lawyer?” In Law or Divorce?...See what I mean.

In truth, this doesn’t explain why you might find an assignment about marriage in the “Computers” category, but there are other complications at play. Namely that the assignments categorized correctly are found and claimed far more rapidly than those that aren’t, so there is an uneven ratio of miscategorized content that sticks around and piles up as the other stuff moves through the system.

A third and final problem with categorization is that in the past we’ve relied heavily on automated programs to choose categories for titles based on contextual semantic matching. What the heck is semantic contextual matching? Let’s just say matching words to other like words. And it’s obviously not perfect, which leads to lots of titles sitting in the wrong category.

Yeah, yeah, so I’m telling you what you already know—that there are flaws in categorization. But what are we doing about it?

The Future of Categorization
It’s taken a lot of time and effort to analyze our process and figure out where the loose ends are. In order to fix the problems, we first had to find out how wrong we were, which meant recategorizing a huge sample of assignments one by one using paid professionals.

From there, we overhauled our contextual matching program and built in a process by which the program can get smarter every time we find a category that is has missed. We’re putting this new program in place next week, and we expect an immediate 15% improvement on the categorization accuracy of all new assignments. Just trust us when we say this will be noticeable.

Next we’ve had to create a plan for using this new program to put a more precise categorization on the millions of titles we already have in our reserve. This is another step that we will undertake within the next 15-30 days, and again, we expect a very clear and noticeable improvement.

Finally, we’ve had to figure out a way to ensure a higher overall level of precision and accuracy in all the areas where there might be a potential loophole (i.e. the Law/Divorce example above). The best way to do this, we’ve determined, is to get more human eyeballs on our titles. We’ve relied heavily on a combo of humans and machines in other parts of the studio (we’ve even made Terminator analogies…ok, maybe that was just me). So now we’ve decided to incorporate a better human-computer blended approach to title categorization.

What does it all mean?
Thankfully, we expect an immediate, drastic improvement in the category accuracy of new assignments in the next 10 days. By end of February, we expect that same uptick to be replicated on older assignments that have been available in the tools for a while now. And by the end of March, once humans are fully integrated, we expect that less than 1 in 25 assignments in the tools will be miscategorized.

I want to personally thank all of the contributors to Demand Studios for their patience as we’ve worked our way through myriad new frontiers of online content creation—most of all those of you who’ve managed to suffer the frustration of spending your valuable time trying to find assignments in our tools, rather than on doing what you do best, executing them. The categorization issue has been a tough nut to crack, from top to bottom, and we do realize how it impacts everyone. We hope the solutions we’ve come up with will start making your jobs easier in the next week or two.

And I’d also like to add a special thanks to the titling team for all the great information posted on the blog this week. We wanted to make sure the creator community was aware that there is a whole crew of us working hard every day to make sure there are ample assignments and hence money to be made. My hope is that we shed some light on what was previously not understood. And if we didn’t, of course, you can always contact us directly at TitlingTeam@demandstudios.com.

Ever wonder what it's like to work for Demand Studios? We checked in with our community of freelance creators—writers, copy editors, filmmakers and titlers—and asked them to share their experiences. Hundreds of people chimed in about why Demand Media works for them. Tune in daily to read their firsthand accounts.




My name is Larry Parr. I've been a full-time freelance writer for more than 30 years. I spent 25 years writing and story editing cartoons for TV. My fondest memory was working for Marvel Productions in the ‘80s under the legendary Stan Lee. I can sum up my reasons for loving Demand Studios in two words: flexibility and reliability. Demand Studios gives me the flexibility to write as much or as little as I need to, and I never have to worry about being paid the proper amount or worry about being paid on time. This gives me a peace of mind that many freelance writing jobs simply can't supply. I love Demand Studios.