Below is the full e-mail:

Dear Writers and Editors,

We realize there has been recent concern around assignment availability. We know many of you rely on Demand Media Studios as a regular income source and as a way to grow your careers. For those reasons and others, we want to be as transparent as we can about the future.

In just a few years, we’ve worked together to grow the eHow.com library to an astounding 3 million articles. While eHow has been the main publisher of content produced by DMS writers, we’ve also developed other writing outlets on our own properties like typeF.com and LIVESTRONG.COM as well as through partnerships like Chron.com and USAToday. With our eHow.com library already so comprehensive, we saw the opportunity to shift our focus to more targeted categories and other forms of content such as slide shows, video series and feature articles. Good examples of these new formats can be found on eHow and LIVESTRONG.COM.

None of this would have been possible without having spent so many years working with you, our writers and editors, to build our comprehensive library.

Looking ahead, as we continue to publish articles for eHow and our other sites, we want to be sure we are building on what already exists, not replicating it. This is not to say we will stop assigning standard titles in How to and Topic View format for eHow.com. But it does mean that we will have fewer eHow.com assignments for the foreseeable future.

However, we will continue to add more publishers and sections as we’ve done over the years, and ultimately the work and opportunities will grow for our best writers and editors. We are also excited to completely execute on our vision of having the most qualified writers and editors working on titles within their areas of expertise.

In order for this to happen, we need to make sure of a few things:
That only executable, valid and unique titles make it to your Work Desk.
That every article is written and copy edited by a qualified professional with background, knowledge or experience in the topic.
That every article has the appropriate format and word count for the topic to be comprehensively covered.
We will also be putting additional focus on helping you grow within your fields. This means offering ways for you to gain exposure on our sites and new tools for you to promote yourself and your work. We will send additional updates and information on assignments going forward. We will also set up some new avenues for you to ask questions and offer feedback. For the time being, if you have any additional questions, please use this forum thread.

Best Regards,
Demand Media Studios Team

[paidContent]

Demand Media owns properties such as LiveStrong.com, eHow.com, Trails.com, GolfLink, and Cracked.com. Google’s algorithm change has affected eHow’s traffic directly. eHow’s traffic has been down in the past quarter.

[TechCrunch]

LiveStrong has the following features:
Get Healthy – Information about Diseases/Conditions, Treatments, Drugs, Symptoms, Vitamins/Supplements, Poisons, Tests, Mental Health, Tools.
Be Active – Sports, Great Outdoors, Fitness, Injuries
Eat Well - Healthy Foods, Eating For Your Condition, Diet & Weight Loss, The Daily Plate (Personalized Weight Loss/Gain Plan)
Find Balance – Stress Management, Family, Career/Finance, Relationships
Stay Young – Appearance/Beauty, Senior Health, Senior Care
Groups – Ability to Create Groups
Forums
Dares – Dares to quit smoking, get more sleep, lose weight, exercise regularly, spend time with family, save money, drink more water, stay sober, etc.

LiveStrong has 600,000 pages of content, 15,000 articles, 350,000 nutritional food profiles, and 50,000 health Q&As.  The homepage has exercise videos powered by iTrain.

Information Source:
[1] paidContent: Armstrong’s Health Site LiveStrong Enters Crowded Field by Rafat Ali

The company has raised a 3rd round of funding at $100 million by investment banking company, Goldman-Sachs. The previous investors include 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners, and Spectrum Equity Partners [Source: alarm:clock]. Demand Media has raised a total of $320 million as of now.

So what does Demand Media actually do?

To be honest, I couldn’t really decipher what they do from their About Us page. “Demand Media is in the business of buying domain names with organic traffic (names with easy to remember names) and adding social networking features to them. Accordingly, they also own domain registrars eNom and BulkRegister” is how Mashable described them.

How they raised $320 million as a domain name brokerage business and what Demand Media will do with the money boggles my mind, but clearly being the guy who at one point ran MySpace means something to all these investors.