Studio Blog
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Titling: The Skeleton Key to the Studio
My name is Justin and I serve as the Lead Title Manager for the Titling Team. I support title production for the Studio, including content distribution across five Demand Studios websites and community management for five different Titling roles. Since I joined the team, I’ve done a little bit of everything, including troubleshooting payment and technical issues, shaping and revising our guidelines, answering questions from our community, testing and recruiting new community members, and helping direct Titling strategy.
As Demand Studios continues to expand, we constantly pursue the efficiencies that creativity, technology, and enterprise can afford us, adapting our processes just in time to address the new challenges we face along the way. It certainly keeps life interesting. And while it may seem like we run a highly efficient black box operation, there are several key processes that make such a complex, large scale operation work smoothly. Titling is one of those processes.
As you may have heard, titles are created in bulk by our patented “Algorithm.” But it’s not as simple as blast mining the internet for millions of titles and then delivering them to writers en masse. While we publish thousands of pieces of content a day, many of those pieces come from titles that are put through an extensive quality control process that begins with the Titling department.
In Titling, we rely heavily on the power of people. Why, you might ask? Well, in order to create a piece of content, a title has to have 1) a clear, specific request for information 2) that we can provide 3) without violating ethics, laws, or copyrights. After some trial and error, we discovered that only people can help us make these determinations.
For example, we might be able to tell a computer to find titles that have nouns in them—such as “Sam Builds Fences”—or verbs—such as “Makita Drill Parts”—or syntactic structure—such as “How to Rob a Train.” But, while the first title makes sense, there is nothing that the title is asking for. While the second is a request, it’s more than likely a request for a website where someone can purchase drill parts, not information. Finally, while the third title is a clear request for specific information, it’s clearly illegal.
Since computers can’t choose titles based on common sense and good judgment, we depend on our communities to recognize quality and determine if something has intent. But we do use technology for tasks that humans aren’t absolutely necessary for. For example, before sending anything to our community members, we cull titles that we think have the potential to be used on one of our sites, excluding as much unpublishable material as possible.
But determining that a title has quality and intent is just one part of the Titling process. Demand Studios’ sites need to publish new content every day, and DS writers have an inexhaustible hunger for assignments. A group of editors sitting around a mahogany table pitching ideas can only come up with so many title ideas. So, once a title receives its seal of approval, it moves on down the line to be matched up with one or multiple sites for publishing.
Titles that have made it through our quality control process go to a holding tank with all of the other verified titles – and from here, our network of sites can pull the titles that they think work best for their particular site voice and focus. Again, we depend on our community to help us make these decisions. With a set of guidelines and a group of very focused individuals, we choose thousands of titles a month for sites like eHow, Livestrong, Answerbag, and Garden Guides. And many of these title selectors are also writers, so their unique understanding of a site’s voice and style—as well as their experience executing on titles—is vital.
At the end of the day, what we’re doing in Titling is fueling the creation and distribution of thousands upon thousands of pieces of content. We’re surfacing the right types of titles, in the right quantity, to the right sites, in the right format, so that writers can find them and write them, copy editors can edit and approve them, Demand Studios can publish them, and you can find and read them whenever you want.
Hopefully, you’ve begun to understand the enormous complexity involved in what Demand Studios does every day…and how Titling sits right at the center of this process.
As Demand Studios continues to expand, we constantly pursue the efficiencies that creativity, technology, and enterprise can afford us, adapting our processes just in time to address the new challenges we face along the way. It certainly keeps life interesting. And while it may seem like we run a highly efficient black box operation, there are several key processes that make such a complex, large scale operation work smoothly. Titling is one of those processes.
As you may have heard, titles are created in bulk by our patented “Algorithm.” But it’s not as simple as blast mining the internet for millions of titles and then delivering them to writers en masse. While we publish thousands of pieces of content a day, many of those pieces come from titles that are put through an extensive quality control process that begins with the Titling department.
In Titling, we rely heavily on the power of people. Why, you might ask? Well, in order to create a piece of content, a title has to have 1) a clear, specific request for information 2) that we can provide 3) without violating ethics, laws, or copyrights. After some trial and error, we discovered that only people can help us make these determinations.
For example, we might be able to tell a computer to find titles that have nouns in them—such as “Sam Builds Fences”—or verbs—such as “Makita Drill Parts”—or syntactic structure—such as “How to Rob a Train.” But, while the first title makes sense, there is nothing that the title is asking for. While the second is a request, it’s more than likely a request for a website where someone can purchase drill parts, not information. Finally, while the third title is a clear request for specific information, it’s clearly illegal.
Since computers can’t choose titles based on common sense and good judgment, we depend on our communities to recognize quality and determine if something has intent. But we do use technology for tasks that humans aren’t absolutely necessary for. For example, before sending anything to our community members, we cull titles that we think have the potential to be used on one of our sites, excluding as much unpublishable material as possible.
But determining that a title has quality and intent is just one part of the Titling process. Demand Studios’ sites need to publish new content every day, and DS writers have an inexhaustible hunger for assignments. A group of editors sitting around a mahogany table pitching ideas can only come up with so many title ideas. So, once a title receives its seal of approval, it moves on down the line to be matched up with one or multiple sites for publishing.
Titles that have made it through our quality control process go to a holding tank with all of the other verified titles – and from here, our network of sites can pull the titles that they think work best for their particular site voice and focus. Again, we depend on our community to help us make these decisions. With a set of guidelines and a group of very focused individuals, we choose thousands of titles a month for sites like eHow, Livestrong, Answerbag, and Garden Guides. And many of these title selectors are also writers, so their unique understanding of a site’s voice and style—as well as their experience executing on titles—is vital.
At the end of the day, what we’re doing in Titling is fueling the creation and distribution of thousands upon thousands of pieces of content. We’re surfacing the right types of titles, in the right quantity, to the right sites, in the right format, so that writers can find them and write them, copy editors can edit and approve them, Demand Studios can publish them, and you can find and read them whenever you want.
Hopefully, you’ve begun to understand the enormous complexity involved in what Demand Studios does every day…and how Titling sits right at the center of this process.
MaryK
Jan 21, 1:08 PM
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