Growing Demand Blog

On my way back from the Goldman Sachs technology & Internet conference in San Francisco, I realized that I was a lot less tired than when it was in Vegas (pre TARP funds of course).  This is now the second time I publicly talked about Demand Media's complete business model (first was at the Web 2.0 Summit).   I thought it would be interesting to call out the three things the audience focused on:     

Our media business is one of the fastest growing according to Comscore.  We are now the 34^th largest media network in the U.S. – up 20 spots YoY.  The most exciting element is that we grew 59% YoY and it was all organic.  Moreover, these are 100% owned and operated properties, not "network" or "affiliate" Sites.  Meaning, we own these sites and can control our own destiny.  This growth demonstrates that our social publishing ecosystem (formerly known as our social media platform) drives growth in media properties and could transform publishing globally.  

Our social publishing ecosystem is a unique mix of humans and machines.  We launched Demand Studios to publish the world's content, recognizing that you would need technology and people to make it successful.  By creating an ecosystem where everything from titling of an article to final proofing is pushed to the community, we have been able to produce professional content at a low cost and at broad scale.  With the rapid deterioration of the newspaper business, this model could provide an alternative to the print industry.  

We know the value of online content.  We really do.  When we commission an article or video to be produced we know its value based on our proprietary algorithms that analyze mountains of Internet data and they tell us what to create.  Therefore, before we ask our experts to produce a piece of content, we already know it has an audience, an advertiser, and the ability to drive traffic to our properties.