While at HostingCon 2007 we had the opportunity to sit down and chat with some old and new faces to WHIR TV, one of which were Richard Rosenblatt, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Demand Media, who took the time to discuss his keynote "Next Generation Web: What Lies Ahead for Hosting" in more detail. He shared his thoughts on the .tv domain, where he saw social media going and how Web hosts could learn from Demand Media's marketing success.
We unfortunately ran into some technical issues with the audio, so we'll be sharing transcriptions of our interviews with you instead. Sorry for any inconvenience.
WHIR TV: Tell me about Demand Media. Who are you and what do you do?
RR: We see ourselves as a social media company. We have a really unique platform that allows you to build out social media content across millions of domains or millions of Web sites all tied together through a unique set of tools.
WHIR TV: Just to clarify from your presentation, you consider yourself a social media company but underneath all that you're a Web hosting provider and a domain registrar?
RR: That's a great question. So, we bought a registrar because we believe it provides the right infrastructure, the right elements to build a social media company. If you believe, like I do, that social media is going to go personal, that it's no longer about the big social networks but about your own social network, it's about Richard.tv, YourBusiness.com, then having the second largest domain infrastructure as well as domain understanding to then lay social media tools on top of, makes all the sense in the world because domains and hosting are integral to everything you do on the Web. I just don't think they should be the main thing that you pitch. You should pitch communication and social media.
WHIR TV: Why the focus on the .tv extension?
RR: We thought about .com because it's so widespread. We thought about the other TLDs. In the end we said, "You know what? Out of all the other domains out there besides .com, .tv is the most understandable. Globally, in almost every country in the world TV means the same thing, it means television and video." So if we made a video centric tool, like Channelme.tv, which is all about grabbing your own videos and expressing yourself, we thought it was the perfect domain to tie to those tools.
WHIR TV: What leads you to believe that social media IS going personal?
RR: I believe that's where it always goes. If you look back at 1996-97 people put their stores all in one big virtual mall at a company I was involved with, iMall.com, or you look at Geocities where everybody put their Web sites all on one big site, it started to fragment. People started to get their own URLs. They were no longer on Geocities. They started to get YourBusiness.com. IMall went from offering a mall to offering your own enabling tools, the ability to add e-commerce to your own Web site, so it always goes from mass to individual. If you look at MySpace or Facebook profiles, they all look like little Web sites, they remind me of little Geocities. At some point, they should all have their own domains and they should name themselves.
WHIR TV: How is your experience with MySpace helping out or playing into your goals with DemandMedia?
RR: The time I spent at MySpace is integral to everything I'm doing now. It wasn't the first time I got involved with user-generated content. When we did iMall in 1994, by 1996 we were offering stores and giving businesses the ability to build their own Web sites, which was user-generated content for businesses. MySpace kind of honed my belief and my understanding of what it takes to empower the user to produce content, which we're going to sell advertising against. What's unique about Demand is we're going to share that advertising revenue back to the users so it's all about publishing to get paid as well as to get famous.
WHIR TV: Can you go a little more in-depth with DemandMedia's monetization model?
RR: Sure, it's not that different with what you see with Google Adsense or a lot of other ad networks out there. Based on the page views, based on the number of metrics, we will give the user a percentage of the revenue we generate. Because of our ability to negotiate with all of the different monetization networks, we're able to get a much higher revenue share than an individual user can so we believe they can make more by doing a direct deal through us than with all the different providers out there.
WHIR TV: If more Web hosts start thinking this way and begin offering social media sites for consumers as a clever way to sell Web hosting and domain names, what's the best way for Web hosting companies to differentiate themselves from competitors who will be offering the same thing and how will they keep customers interested beyond the initial hype? Because as things go, a social media site is popular one day and then gets tossed for the next great social networking site that pops up.
RR: The goal of the presentation wasn't to give them the solution. It was to help them think outside of the box. The goal was to say, "Hey, we're sitting on this domain company and hosting and we're able to create this really cool product called ChannelMe.tv where Carson Daly and a bunch of other celebrities are involved and people are getting behind. And we're selling thousands of channels." Where you couldn't sell .tv's on their own, somehow you build a social media site and you can sell twice as much. It's very odd isn't it? It's all about presentation. The goal was not to give Web hosts the answer, but to show them the solution to differentiate themselves in a commoditizing type of business.
My second answer is yes, that's my whole point. People get fickle and jump around from MySpace to Facebook to all over the place because it's not about you it's about what is the new cool, hip place. If instead, a company is selling you the ability to build your own channel, your own url, maybe it'll be on the other social networks also, but in the end, it'll come back to your own identity and it's kind of like your phone number or your own address. It's like selling a business their url to build their business, it's the same with selling to an individual their url to spend their Web life on. See that's the transition, that consumers are now using the Web the way businesses used to. That's the way the markets always shift and that's what we see happening now.
WHIR TV: In terms of ChannelMe.tv how can businesses best utilize it to market who they are and benefit their businesses?
RR: There are a lot of businesses that buy their own .tv and post videos around a certain topic. For example, there is a channel called chocolatechipcookies.tv and what this user does is she grabs videos of how to make the best chocolate chip cookies from YouTube, MySpace and other hosting sites and she puts them up on her site. What this does is garner leads of people who are interested in chocolate chip cookies and I believe what she's doing now is selling direct-to-ship her own homemade chocolate chip cookies. So anyone looking for this topic will search for it on Google and they'll find her because she's aggregating content and is listed high because she's part of our network, they'll come to her and now she has a new customer that she can now communicate with through blogs, friends lists, profiles etc.
WHIR TV: How has the industry responded to these ideas you've put forth?
RR: To be honest, much more positive than I expected. All these businesses I've been involved with in the past, everyone's told me I'm crazy, it doesn't make sense, there's no advertising model people have been embracing this concept that social media goes beyond a big portal, so I would say the response has been 100 percent positive. We've had no serious negative response to these ideas.
WHIR TV: What's next for DemandMedia?
RR: I think we're going to keep building on our core strategy of the belief that social networking is going personal and vertical and we're going to buy lots and lots of companies and build lots and lots of tools to lead that market. As the market continues to fragment we want to be there in those passionate verticals to provide users with tools and technologies that they need. And we want to pay them for it.
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