Demand Media IS Blowing Up!!

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I had a late one last Wednesday night with the mother in-law in town, sleeping on our pull out couch. It seems that anytime you get a married daughter and her mother together for an overnight, they will keep the entire house up late at night catching up (some just call it gossiping) But, I digress……..

While I was at Shopzilla, I was introduced to a very savvy Internet entrepreneur named Michael Blend from Hotkeys, a website operator for some of the most notable general term domains online. Michael has always been a straight up guy with me and as soon as I sent out the email about my resigning from Shopzilla, he was the first person to offer his help and the first person that kept his word! Thanks Michael!

Michael’s Hotkeys company was acquired by Demand Media the Richard Rosenblatt lead company, months back. In fact, when I was out at the TRAFFIC conference (The king of all domain conferences) in Florida last year, I believe that Hotkeys had already been acquired, which would explain his high energy, positive mood at the conference! Michael had indicated that there was a ton of opportunity within Demand’s growing media group and connected me to Larry Fitzgibbon, Senior Vice President, Monetization, who followed up with me within only a few hours of my reaching out.

I met with Larry and Steven Kydd, Executive Vice President, Content and Business Development within only days and really enjoyed my conversation with them both. That is of course, once I found their offices located on 3rd Street Promenade, tucked way behind the more typical retail shops that are otherwise found on the promenade.

Frankly speaking, Demand Media is blowing up! They have developed a system for acquiring underutilized / under monetized properties and maximizing the full value of those properties by integrating various tools developed in-house, including social networking tools, answers platform, ehow content among many others. They are a fully integrated next generation media company with leading registrar enom.com, domain parking provider Hotkeys and a number of premium content properties among Demands’ portfolio. After raising $220MM last year the team is focused on growing the business to a $2B market cap over the next two years. Now that’s FAST!!

I like what I heard from the guys at Demand Media and look forward to hearing back from them once they are in a better position to bring on additional GM types or deal makers after their next round of content acquisitions over the coming weeks. Larry and Steven demonstrated not only the will to pull off Demand’s “2 in 2” plan, both with that “something to prove” edge after both having worked during the bubblicious days at a couple of dot com busts but also the smarts to make it happen. This is a solid team all around.

June 12th, 2007