And this is the other part of their statement:

However, the company said some third-party estimates on the impact have "significantly overstated" the negative impact of those changes on traffic to eHow.com.

The reason they are making press statements is that their stock prices are influenced. But according to the article, only 28% of revenue was coming from Google traffic. That sounds healthy to me.

I hope that the Demand shares will drop much deeper the coming days. 10% per day would be lovely. Their "writers" re-wrote hundreds of articles form my websites and the only thing I got in return was a nofollow "reference" link.

Investors must be crazy to invest in a business that's mainly built on re-written content "borrowed" from other sites.

Get the money, float a company, recruit cheap workforce form all around (including third world countries) and make them rewrite all the existing stuff on the web - This is demand media.

wow, what a business model!

I seemingly doubt those investors went into the situation blind or without hearing some guarantees. With all the high profile people involved there was likely some sit-downs with Google higher ups prior to the release of E-How. With news stories breaking of a possible bias, Congressional hearings on the horizon, and Cutts going quiet on the matter I strongly suspect somebody's rear is being covered.

I was doing some research and discovered that Demand Media owns one of my favorite websites - Cracked.com. That information woke me up. There is a lot of business and content savvy at Demand Media, and it's not a good idea to just slam them because of the worst pages on eHow.

The reason they are making press statements is that their stock prices are influenced. But according to the article, only 28% of revenue was coming from Google traffic. That sounds healthy to me.

This is true. I didn't mean to only give half the story in the original post; I wanted to be brief and mainly share the article link. It seems to me, if Google only accounts for 28% of their revenue, then the MOST they could have lost due to Panda (using the peak 13% drop in share prices as stated in the article) would be .28x.13=.03 =3% and that assumes they lost ALL of their Google traffic.

I think the most significant aspect of this article is that Panda has now been partially implicated in a company's revenue loss. This puts Panda in the mainstream media today, and is additional negative press for Google.

There is a lot of business and content savvy at Demand Media, and it's not a good idea to just slam them because of the worst pages on eHow.

One sample: eHow copied (re-wrote...)one of my articles + image and was (before the DMCA) ranking on the first position instead of me. I had that first position in the SERPS for many years, before the theft. To me Demand Media is a company that makes money from content theft and the rest doesn't interest me at all.

Well, they better be careful with their content now or there will be litigation/class action. It's time to clean up their act.

ehow used my websites as references on there articles so many times and never followed the link

I seemingly doubt those investors went into the situation blind or without hearing some guarantees.

Take a look at what stock markets have done over the last twenty years: investors are not always sensible.

The plan the early investors had was to get a listing and start selling before it fell apart.

New post in Forbes [blogs.forbes.com] claims that DemandMedia traffic from Google is down 40%. DemandMedia's stock price is said to be down by over 40%.

About the stock's swirl around the toilet bowl:

...there’s a reason Demand Media’s stock has fallen more than 40 percent this month. Today it hit its lowest level yet, $14.05 a share.

About the collapse of Google referrals to DemandMedia:

Some individual Demand sites are doing even worse than that, with Answerbag, a questions-and-answers site, being the hardest hit. Its Google referrals are down 80 percent. Meanwhile, eHow, Demand’s largest and most important site by far, is down 29 percent;

The above is reference to Google's traffic to the site, not total traffic.

The dangerous thing that can arise from this is people will likely associate that Google can obliterate any online businesses overnight and that can send jitters through the stock market. In other words it’s being done to thousands of small businesses already without much fanfare so who will be next. Plus its gets even trickier when you claim no bias and you’re seeding your own index with sites that directly enhance your own earnings. It becomes more and more difficult to proclaim your innocence when you’re standing directly over a dead body with a smoking pistol in your hand.

I am curious about the other 72% of their revenue, are they selling content to other media companies, must do some digging

The dangerous thing that can arise from this is people will likely associate that Google can obliterate any online businesses overnight and that can send jitters through the stock market. In other words it’s being done to thousands of small businesses already without much fanfare so who will be next. Plus its gets even trickier when you claim no bias and you’re seeding your own index with sites that directly enhance your own earnings. It becomes more and more difficult to proclaim your innocence when you’re standing directly over a dead body with a smoking pistol in your hand.

That's happening already with Panda and Google adding their links essentially all over the first page is a known fact. With Google making 65%-95% of search traffic you are at their mercy. One day you're a king, the next they decide your site is junk--and it's your fault. Of course if Google gets in the same line of business as you, Matt Cutts and Co will consider your sites spam, or duplicates since Google already provides that. Google needs to be slapped down to 33% of search traffic to limit the harm they can cause