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 Oscar ceremonies on People, TMZ, Entertainment Weekly, Variety and the Daily Beast. Demand Media has originally made a strategic investment in CoveritLive back in 2009, acquiring a minority interest in the startup. With today’s acquisition, CoverItLive will become a platform within Demand Media’s portfolio of social “solutions.”
Chairman and CEO of Demand Media Richard Rosenblatt said of the acquisition: “CoveritLive really reflects our mission as a company – publishing what the world wants to know and share. Consumers around the world are tuning in by the millions to participate in live events powered by CoveritLive, collectively spending over a billion minutes on the platform each month.”
My colleagues over at Crunchgear have used CoverItLive for liveblogging purposes but aren’t the biggest fan of the service as it has failed them a number of times during events and currently favor competitive tool ScribbleLive for live coverage.
Now that it is a public company, Demand Media just released its first earnings report, which showed an increase in revenue in its most recent financial quarter. But shares of the the company have been down, after Google announced changes to its search algorithm that could negatively impact the content farm. Demand Media is dependent on Google search traffic and a change in ranking could negatively effect the content farm’s business. But Rosenblatt seems optimistic despite these changes, telling an audience at an advertising conference this week “Nothing changed materially for our business,” (as reported by Ad Week).
Demand also issued a public statement following Google’s announcement, “We cannot be commenting every time Google makes an algorithm change. It’s just one component of our ecosystem. We’re fine. We’re just trying to create quality content.”