Demand Media

Demand Media is an Internet company based in Santa Monica, California, which is known primarily for its content farm eHow and the domain name registrar eNom. It was founded in May 2006 and is traded on the New York Stock Exchange since January 2011. Until then, the company had never made ​​a profit.

History

Richard Rosenblatt, who served as chairman of the social network MySpace before, and Shawn Colo called Demand Media in May 2006. The company recruited a multi-million dollars in venture capital, among other things, by the investment bank Goldman Sachs Subsequently, Demand Media has developed into a holding company, the high-growth companies in the Internet industry publicly buying, including eHow and eNom.

In early 2011 gave Demand Media announced its intention to go public, the IPO should first have only a total volume of 138 million U.S. dollars. On the first day of trading, the share price rose by 33 percent, so that Demand Media is rated as one billion U.S. dollars. Demand Media said in his statements to the SEC that a Herabstuftung by Google constitutes a major risk for the company's success. This was in April 2011, some three months after the IPO, the first noticeable on a larger scale.

Importance

Demand Media is one with eNom 's three largest domain name registrars worldwide, Tucows and after GoDaddy. In May 2010, the number of registered domains was about 9.3 million addresses. With the acquisition of Name.com this value increased by about 1.5 million domains further. It was also known that Demand Media is one of the largest applicants for new top -level domains: Overall, eNom applied for yourself or as a technical service provider in cooperation with another registrar to 334 entries, ahead of Afilias, Verisign and other interested parties.

Criticism

Prior to entering the market in German-speaking Demand Media has been pre- masse provide high lack of content. EHow to operate " journalism of the Resterampe " who could not provide valuable content. Since these would be produced specifically for the dissemination of advertising, the business model was grotesque, a different accusation. Demand Media emphasized because of the criticism, however, consider its platforms, not even as a journalistic work.

The subsidiary eNom came in autumn 2004 under criticism after masse. Info domains have been registered, so that eventually even the technical backend had to be switched off. Reason was an action of the domain name registry Afilias, under which any person up to 25th info domains could sign up for a year for free. eNom took advantage of this method in order to register. info domains that are identical to existing ones. com addresses. These were then offered to the respective owner for purchase.