eHow and its owner, Demand Media, are fraudulently scamming their writers and the public by using dubious tactics to inflate the amount of content they have on their sites by:

1. Cloning articles and apparently not paying writers for the cloned versions, even though the writers own the copyrights,

2. Creating more than 2 million (to date) pages of just comments, that have no value to readers when separated from their associated articles,

3. Reinstating articles that authors have deleted, which writers are supposed to be able to do. This causes duplicate content and suspected plagiarism issues for the writers when they re-publish on other sites,

4. Arbitrarily deleting articles by residual income writers and replacing them with pre-paid equivalent articles,

5. Manipulating page content on UK cloned articles to rank higher than the originals that writers are paid for, and apparently keeping all profits for themselves in direct conflict with a written promise on the UK site that they will pay for the "usefulness" of such content. At least we think so. This is documented on http://crunchydata.com

6. They also refuse to answer direct questions from the writers.

7. And they maintain a chronically technically-buggy site that frequently prevents writers from editing and deleting their own articles AND causes frequent payment issues.

Many people have invested months, even years, in trusting this company, and they stay because it's extremely difficult to delete their articles and re-establish traffic to them elsewhere, once eHow 'traps' the articles by re-directing their URLs and/or re-writing the content and keeping that high search-engine rank that the original author earned.

It appears that Demand Media may be using some of these tactics to make its sites appear larger and more valuable before they offer stock to the public.

Suggestion: Avoid eHow and Demand Media at all costs, or at least visit their forums and search online blogs before investing your time in them, to see what people with experience think.

If you have been victimized by eHow / Demand Media, write to the BBB, post your own experience to complaintsboard, and look for other places to help expose them.