The more you dig into the Demand Studios topic, the more dirt you find. For those who don’t know, Demand Studios offers “writing careers.” According to their website, “Demand Studios Empowers You to Take Control of Your Career – Work as much as you want, from wherever you want. Fill gaps between full-time jobs or work with us full-time – our freelance jobs are as flexible as you need them to be. If you are an experienced and passionate creator, we want you to join our team. We have more work than you can possibly handle, and we are growing every month. And though you can work from anywhere, it doesn’t mean you work alone. We have a team of editors and fellow freelancers to support you along the way.”

The plain truth is, working for Demand Studios represents the lowest level of journalism – if you can call it that. Their average writer works for less than minimum wage. For some it makes a living, but none of them seems really satisfied.

Anyways, this morning I checked my website statistics and noticed that I had received several hits from another website, DemandStudiosSucks.com – I had written about the topic before, and my post receives continuing attention. I was curious, so I checked the website out, and it was fun! Here is somebody who works for Demand Studios, doesn’t like the work, and runs an anonymous blog. His name is Patrick O’Doare, which seems to be a pseudonym, otherwise he would get fired immediately from his job with Demand Studios.

Let me quote from one of his entries, titled Title Clarification – How to Build an Indoor Gun Range: ”

The titles at Demand are all generated by a computer program. This program looks at what people are searching for on the web and then spits out a title for an article on that subject. This results in some rather humorous article titles (ie: The “How to Toss Someone’s Salad” incident). There’s a forum on the Demand Writers page where you can ask for clarifications regarding these titles. I’d just like to touch on some of these funny ones from time to time.

The one I stumbled across today was “How to Build an Indoor Gun Range”. Lord help us all if you’re setting about to build an indoor gun range and the first entry that you find in Google is the eHow article. In the forum, the writer for the article suggested that the title was a bit confusing, and instead suggested they focus on the aspects of building an indoor gun range – sound abatement, ventilation, bullet trap, safety features, etc.”

Feeling inspired, I did some research myself and found an article, How to Write a Grant Proposal for an Indoor Gun Range. One paragraph in the article made me almost choke, considering that I have three-year-old at home: “Emphasize the benefits an indoor gun range provides to the community. Always mention how the children in the area can benefit, as most people care about this a great deal. Shooting is an athletic event in, for example, the NCAA and the Olympic games, and acquiring the skill can help a young person go to college or learn dedication that will serve him in the future. Some people are scared of firearms, but an indoor gun range in the area usually has the opposite effect; once more people know how to shoot correctly, they are much safer around guns.”

Okay, let me get this right… Let’s get an indoor gun range to make our children happy? Ergo, if they’re not happy, but rather frustrated, they still know how to handle guns, and one morning, when the frustration overflows, they go to college (or high school) to shoot fellow students and teachers?

Yes, I can see how an indoor gun range can be beneficial for the community! And yes, this is the kind of stuff you can write for Demand Studios, empowering you to take control of your career.

Let me know what you think, whether you agree with me or not, by writing a response below. I’d like to hear from you!