If there’s an eHow article about boosting a company’s bottom line, Demand Media Inc. might want to take note.

Hit by a $232 million noncash goodwill impairment charge, the Santa Monica digital content and media publisher, which owns eHow, saw its stock price drop after reporting a third-quarter loss last week.

Demand reported a net loss of $224 million (-$11.69 a share) for the quarter ended Sept. 30, much worse than the net loss of $10.4 million (-58 cents) the same period a year earlier. Third-quarter revenue declined 19 percent year over year to $41.3 million. Analysts had expected a loss of 62 cents a share on revenue of $39.1 million.

After the release of quarterly numbers, shares of Demand slid 17 percent to close at $5.70 the week ended on Nov. 12, making it the biggest loser on the LABJ Stock Index. (See page 60.)

In an earnings call with analysts, outgoing Chief Financial Officer Mel Tang attributed the loss to a combination of factors, including lower revenue as traffic to some of its websites slowed.

Chief Executive Sean P. Moriarty, who joined the company in August, noted that improving eHow is Demand’s top corporate priority.

“We are well under way with this push for quality and will remove 1.8 million underperforming articles in Q4 focused again on high quality rather than breadth for breadth’s sake,” Moriarty said in the conference call.

Demand, which had a market cap of $2 billion when it went public in 2011, was seen as a “content farm,” tailoring its articles to maximize traffic referred by search engines. But that business went south later that year when Google Inc. adjusted its search algorithm to skip low-quality content. Today, Demand’s market cap is about $100 million.

Evercore ISI analyst Doug Arthur in New York said the market reacted negatively based on uncertainty over when Demand’s numbers will improve.

“They’re going through an arduous transition, trying to fix the content side of their business,” Arthur said. “They’re trying to cull down the excess content and really raise the quality. That’s in an effort to attract higher-quality traffic and more traffic and make user experience better.”

Arthur noted the spinoff of Demand’s domain name business, Rightside Group, might also expose weakness in the core business.

Tang, who has been with the company since 2006, announced his departure last week, agreeing to stay on through the end of the year and to act as a consultant through the first quarter of 2015 to assist in the transition.

Arthur didn’t think the market was reacting to the announcement.

“Mel is a great CFO,” Arthur said. “He’s been there a long time. I don’t think it’s a shock he’s moving on.”