Let me tell you about my new freelance gig.

I've been offered a chance to write online articles for a California-based company called Demand Media.

Never heard of it? Well what if I tell you that there are more than a million Demand Media articles floating around on the web right now. And before today is over, another 4,000 or so will be added to the total.

They produce videos, too. Lots of videos.

Type faster. The freelancer's lot: $15 for a 450-word article. (Reuters)

In fact, there are five times more Demand Media videos on YouTube than any other single source. And these videos are streamed more than two million times a day.

Little wonder Demand Media is often referred to as a content factory.

Now, none of these articles or videos is likely to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The average article is about 400 words long. Videos are generally under three minutes.

Most are of the "how-to" variety, though there are also many travel tips as well as consumer product reviews.

All this content is produced by more than 7,000 Demand Media freelance writers and videographers, and is vetted by a team of about 650 freelance copy editors.

Most of these writers and editors appear to be unemployed journalists, budding freelance writers, stay-at-home moms, and others who like the flexibility and freedom that writing for Demand Media can bring.

The pay certainly isn't enough to make you want to quit your day job.

A Canadian pioneer

To become one of the chosen you have to submit a resumé, samples of your writing and anything you might have had published.

After a deliberation process that can take up to a week, you get an email telling you if you've been accepted or rejected.

Up until a few weeks ago, only Americans were allowed to apply. Now, British and Canadian citizens can get hired as writers, but not as editors or videographers.

So I'm one of the first Canadians to get the nod. You might say I'm a pioneer.

Frightening words

But before you rush to join me, there are some things you need to know about writing for Demand Media.

They help explain why a recent article in Vanity Fair declared that "for many of the people trying to eke out a living in the world of traditional media, the two most frightening words in the English language are Demand Media."

They also help explain why one freelancer titled his recent blog rant "Demand Media Can Go to Hell."

The problem begins with the pay scale.

The good news is that Demand Media guarantees that you will get paid promptly for the articles you write. For a freelancer, that kind of certainty is hard to find these days.

The bad news is that for a typical 450-word article, Demand Media will pay you about $15. That works out to about three cents a word.

For decades, the industry standard has been around a dollar a word for most consumer and general interest magazines, about half that for newspapers.

At Demand Media, my editor will get $3.50 to fact-check and edit my copy.

To put that in perspective, in order to make as much money as a typical supermarket checkout clerk, I will have to churn out about seven articles a day.

And a copy editor will have to plow through about three articles an hour, for eight hours every day.

This is an industrial model applied to information — Henry Ford meets journalism.

Courting Google

But the pay scale isn't the only way that Demand Media differs from your typical publisher.

Content creators, or users? Keyboardists at an internet cafe in China. (Reuters)

Most freelance writers will pitch a story to an editor and hope the editor gives them the green light. But at Demand Media, that process leaves too much to chance.

The editor might think the story is interesting, but what if the readers don't? And more importantly, what if potential advertisers don't?

You see, Demand Media's ultimate goal is extraordinarily ambitious.

They want to be able to predict all the questions that potential readers might ask a search engine on a given subject in order to shape the stories that their writers will produce.

Then, they want their writers to attempt to answer those questions in such a way that these stories will be found at or near the top of what a search robot like Google's might yield.

If it works, all that traffic should make their content highly attractive to advertisers, which could eventually make Demand Media highly profitable.

All about the algorithms

To accomplish their objective, the folks at Demand Media can't afford to rely on the whims of writers and editors who like to think they know what the reading public wants.

Instead, they have developed three highly sophisticated algorithms to help them determine their editorial priorities.

The first scans hundreds of millions of search queries, looking for popular keywords to determine which topics are in demand.

Then a second algorithm is unleashed to determine how much, if anything, advertisers would be willing to pay to appear on pages that include those keywords.

A third algorithm determines how many other stories on that topic already exist on the web. All of this math yields a seemingly inexhaustible list of potential stories.

In fact, there are currently more than 170,000 stories that Demand writers like me can choose from. All of these stories need to have a long shelf life, so "news" isn't really part of their business model.

But topics like "how to become a nutritionist in Nova Scotia" or "how to make a lacrosse head pocket deeper" are currently available to any Demand Media freelancers prepared to write 450 words for $15 a shot.

The algorithms virtually guarantee that so long as the stories are written in a way that will elevate them to the top of the search page, advertisers will be interested.

That is why Demand Media writers have dozens of pages of instructions outlining precisely how their story must be written.

Some are obvious ("do not write about topics if you are unfamiliar with the subject matter"), while others are designed to ensure internet search success ("each article must contain at least three unique 'key concepts' which concisely summarize what the article is about").

Any deviation from the formula will result in the story being rejected by a copy editor.

How to

Journalists have always had to consider the wishes of advertisers, but Demand Media takes that relationship to a new level.

The process comes as close to taking the human element out of journalism as anyone has yet devised: Information in the service of the algorithm.

So far, though, it seems to be working. The company has raised $355 million since it began in 2006 and, last year, it generated more than $200 million in revenue.

Newspapers like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution now run Demand Media articles in their travel section.

For the paper, it's an easy source of cheap content. If the editors had commissioned the story themselves, they would have had to pay a writer a couple of hundred dollars at least.

But despite Demand Media's parsimonious pay scale, there's no shortage of writers eager to answer their call. Though I may not be one of them.

In scouring the list of 170,000 topics, looking for something I can write about, I realized that I don't have a great deal of practical how-to knowledge that I can condense easily into 450 words.

I'd actually have to do some research, maybe make some calls. Then I'd have to spend time learning to write in a way that will please the Demand Media algorithm.

There's only so much a guy can be expected to do for $15.

These are pretty tough times for freelance writers, videographers and editors. Thanks to Demand Media, they just got tougher.