What Demand Media can do for the domain name business.
[This is the second part of a two-part story on Demand Media. See part one here.]
For many years, Demand Media has been a mystery to the domain name industry. It’s a big player, for sure. It snapped up eNom and then BulkRegister, making it the second largest domain name registrar in the world. Its registrars have 10 million domains under management, and Demand Media owns a nice portfolio of its own. The company also acquired domain parking company HotKeys.
But what does that have to do with Demand Media’s burgeoning content business?
Demand Media is creating the tools that will help the domain industry do what everyone is talking about: develop their domains.
In a blog post last November, HotKeys founder and Demand Media VP Michael Blend explained the connection. Demand wants to take the same tools it used to create a top 20 online media network and bring the magic to domain owners. It believes there’s an opportunity to bring value to the 100 million undeveloped domains.
Will it work? When Demand was just a collection of media sites and domain registrars, it didn’t add up to much. But now that the company has a full fledged content army and social tools, it is beginning to show the potential to make it happen.
It’s not as simple as just taking a few articles that would have been published on eHow.com and publishing them on a virgin domain name. There’s no search engine juice, and the revenue model breaks down. But RichContent gives us a hint of what’s to come. Demand Media has good social media tools, which, when combined with good content, can power the web.
Here are two ways Demand Media could enable domain name owners to get more out of their domains in the near future:
Fast content – as domain owners launch web sites, they need content. It needs to be compelling, too. Demand Studios can offer content targeted to individual domains, as well as provide the tools to quickly publish it. It can also create a syndication network, driving SEO value back to the new web sites.
Perpetual parking – domain parking companies only focus on today’s click. The real play is to captivate visitors and turn them into long term revenue sources. One way to do this is to get their e-mail address and send them follow up newsletters with ads. Demand Media has the scale (and tools via Pluck) to create relevant content-based newsletters across tens of thousands of topics, bringing recurring revenue to domain monetization.
Demand Media doesn’t yet have the magic bullet for domainers who park their domains. But it is building the engine, and certainly ranks at the top of the list of companies that could turn domain monetization on its head.
Jade says
I love it. Bring it on. 🙂
Chris Robbins says
I’m surprised this two-part post doesn’t have more discussion. Everybody must be at dinner or watching Webster reruns. They are two of the best posts I’ve read recently. Now, if Demand Media can perfect their art for their own sites and bring it to us it could re-ignite the domaining industry. Problem as it stands now, sites like eHow are getting called out all the time for it’s sloppy assembly line content & not just content that was made before they purchased the site. If they are cleaning up their content it is only because customers & Google won’t stand for it after awhile.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Chris – I think domainers have a problem reading more than 300 words sometimes 🙂
I think a clearer measure of content quality would be at LiveStrong, since everything there (I believe) was created since the relatively recent launch of the site. I watched a few videos yesterday and read a couple articles. It’s a small sample size, but generally speaking the articles/videos gave me the answer I’d want if I was searching for the content. One of the videos was kind of generic (eating fruits/veggies to stave off a cold), but most were detailed. The video also had some “ums” in it. But that doesn’t really matter to me if I get the information I want. You surely get better quality with a Demand produced video on a topic than a homemade one on YouTube.
Tony says
Andrew, is Demand Media planning to open up their tool chest to the rest of us or is that speculation on your part?
Andrew Allemann says
Tony – Michael Blend’s blog post (as linked to in the story) makes it clear to me that Demand will provide tools to domain owners. Whether or not we’ll be able to do specific things such as order custom content through Demand Studios is just a possibility.
USK says
>> Michael Blend’s blog post
>> (as linked to in the story)
>> makes it clear to me
>> that
>> Demand will provide tools to domain owners.
any plan from them ??
sorry ,
up2now ,
their blog is still not resolved yet
thanks , 2w
Robert Haastrup-Timmi says
Interesting article Andrew!
Basically, Demand Media are looking to “Wikipedia” Domain names with the content they produce by the sounds of it.
That is very very clever indeed, should this be the case. Now that would make me very happy!
bernard says
I think there is a lot of wishfull thinking in this article:
1. A domainer with his isolated domains (no backlinks) won’t be able to buy unique content from Demand media and get enough traffic to recover the costs to acquire the articles ($20 per article)
2. If Demand media syndicate its content for revenue share with the domainer, it will be duplicated content for Google, thus very little traffic and high risk for their properties (eHow.com, etc)
The fact is that a domain with no backlinks can’t generally speaking be monetized, and 99% of the 100 millions undeveloped domains are of this kind.
Maria (WriterGig) says
Very intriguing article! As a webmaster, domain name owner and Demand Studios writer, I find this quite interesting. Thanks for the post.
Media Planning says
The domain business is the best place to find some of the greediest people imaginable.