Last we heard from Demand Media it was beating earnings expectations, with a revenue performance up 17 percent in the second quarter and even boasting of a small profit. The ‘social content’ company was also on a upward swing on its stock. Perhaps it’s that momentum which is behind today’s news that the company has acquired the Denver-based Name.com, a domain name registrar with a strong retail… → Read More
One of my favorite recent blog posts is Seth Godin’s “Getting funded is not the same as succeeding.” Whether or not we’re in a bubble, it’s a sign of the times that this post has to be written in the first place. As Josh Elman tweets, we’ve gone from RIP Good Times to funding a grilled cheese company in less than three years (Sequoia was involved in both interestingly). Instead… → Read More
Content platform Demand Media reported its first quarter 2011 results today, reporting revenue of $79.5 million, an increase of 48% compared to $53.6 million in Q1 2010, beating analyst expectations of $69.49 million in Q1 revenue. The company reported a net loss of $5.6 million compared to a net loss of $4.1 million in Q1 2010. Net loss per share was $0.13 compared to $0.94 in Q110.
In a… → Read More
On the heels of its entry to the public market, content farm Demand Media has just acquired CoverItLive, a liveblogging tool. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
CoverItLive provides an extensive tool one can use for liveblogging live events or other real-time stuff such as earnings calls, press conferences and more. In fact, this past weekend, CoverItLive powered liveblogs for the… → Read More
Content farm Demand Media’s stock officially debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “DMD” after its IPO, in which it raised $151.3 million and was valued at just under $1.5 billion.
And on its first day as a public company, Demand Media’s stock is performing well. The stock is up 36 percent from an initial pricing of $17 to $23. → Read More
This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which provided a wealth of information. But some of the… → Read More
Social news site Gather has raised another $2.4 million in funding this week, in order to pivot its core business and focus on being a content on demand platform for other publishers, like Demand Media. Gather currently allows to writers to submit content and generate ad revenue share based on pageviews and site engagement. → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the CEO of WatchMojo, a producer and distributor of premium video content. Read his other posts here, or follow him on Twitter @ashkan
My cohort at Revision 3, CEO Jim Louderback, recently wrote an article called “Screw Viral Videos.” Why? Because according to Louderback, “viral videos deliver little or no value to… → Read More
Anybody want to buy a content farm? Demand Media filed its IPO registration today. It describes its business this way:
While traditional media companies create content based on anticipated consumer interest, we create content that responds to actual consumer demand. Our approach is driven by consumers’ desire to search for and discover increasingly specific information across the Internet.
It… → Read More
So yesterday, I notice there’s a new article up on Google’s main blog, head on over there and see it’s merely a post featuring the latest video in the company’s Search Stories series, video ads which essentially aim to highlight how all kinds of people use Google Search. They’re nice and all, if pretty pointless in my book, but nothing particularly spectacular about them.
But this latest one… → Read More
Video distribution and monetization platform provider Joost, owned by Adconion Media Group since its assets were acquired in November 2009, is today announcing a global sales and technology partnership with online publishing powerhouse Demand Media.
Under the terms of the exclusive agreement, Demand Media will leverage Adconion’s video ad serving platform to deliver all premium video campaigns… → Read More
Are content farms the future of online media? Demand Media is now providing travel tips to USA Today, and Aol is supplementing its thousands of paid journalists with an even larger army of citizen freelancers. If nothing else, Demand Media and AOL deserve credit for generating excitement over content. While an octogenarian like Sumner Redstone might claim that “content is king” and a… → Read More
Which online video companies will get bought in 2010? Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers. Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of… → Read More
It’s been a long drought for IPOs, but venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs are hopeful that 2010 will be the year they rain down on the Valley once gain. Earlier this year, a handful of IPOs trickled out, such as OpenTable, Rackspace, and A123Systems. But what people are really waiting for is another Netscape moment—an iconic IPO which will whet investor’s appetites and open the… → Read More
A couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong caused a little bit of a stir when he hinted that AOL is working on a “secret” technology project. When pressed for details on what exactly it is, he was vague. But after fishing around with our sources, we have a pretty good idea.
The secret project is a new content-management system (CMS) which will make it easier to produce and… → Read More
Demand Media launches Pluck on Demand tonight – a new service that will add contextually relevant content to publishing websites via an easy to use widget. In other words, if you don’t have enough content, Pluck on Demand will add appropriate stuff to your site for you.
Pluck on Demand is similar to Blogburst, a product launched in 2006 that brought blog content to larger media sites. But it’s… → Read More
Demand Media, founded by former Intermix Media (the parent company to MySpace) CEO Richard Rosenblatt, has quietly grown into a pretty large business, with rumored revenues of around $250 million, and profitable. It just so happens that what Demand Media is good at – generating lots of advertising impressions and creating niche social networks for media sites, may be a perfect fit for at… → Read More
Demand Media, a big buyer and operator of Internet domain name companies, completed negotiations to acquire Austin-based Pluck last night after about two months of negotiations. The price is not being disclosed but is rumored to be in the $50 million range. Update: We’ve confirmed the number from an inside source – $75 million, all cash. Pluck revenues are around $10 million/year. → Read More
Domain holding company Demand Media has taken $100 million Series C funding in a round led by Goldman Sachs that included 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Spectrum Equity Investors. The new round takes Demand Media’s total funding to the rather extraordinary figure of $320 million and values Demand Media at $1 billion. Demand Media is primary a domaining company… → Read More
Demand Media rolled out me.tv today, a new social network around person video sites. You have to have a .tv domain name to create a site on the network, which costs $25/year. Once you’ve registered a .tv domain name, me.tv provides you with a number of templates to choose from. You can also create an introductory video (via a partnership with VideoEgg), add blog posts, videos from other… → Read More
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