Company has raised $320M to date.
According to several blog and media reports today, domain name company Demand Media has raised an additional $100M in capital. That brings its total to a staggering $320M. Demand Media was founded by former MySpace executive Richard Rosenblatt.
The company owns eNom, the second largest registrar (by names registered), as well as a large portfolio of good domain names. The company also markets the .TV domain name, which it is trying to “rebirth” after its initial failed launched. Demand Media tries to apply social networking tools to domain names.
Some of Demand Media’s sites include Run.com, Trails.com, and Grab.com.
According to legend, Rosenblatt got the idea for the company after reading “Master of Their Domains”, a 2005 story in now defunct Business 2.0. In November 2006 Rosenblatt said he wanted to take the company public in 2007 at a market cap of $2B.
The numbers don’t make much sense to me. If you’ve raised $320M and go public with a market cap of $2B, the return to early investors isn’t that great. I assume that recent investors bought in at a very high valuation.
I’m not fully bought in to Demand Media’s stated mission, including applying social networking to thousands of domain names and the .tv domain, but I’m sure there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that I don’t know about.
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