HostingCon 2007: Does Richard Rosenblatt Get it?

There was an unusual amount of buzz around yesterday’s opening keynote by Richard Rosenblatt, CEO and chairman of Demand Media. Certainly an interesting guy - the former CEO of Web phenomenon MySpace now making Waves in the hosting world after co-founding Demand Media, and acquiring eNom and Bulkregister last year to create, among the company’s assets, the second largest domain registrar in the world.

Attendees arriving for the keynote all but filled out the very, very large grand ballroom here at Navy Pier, a fact that reinforced, for me, the unusual level of interest in the keynote.

The presentation itself was a show of the sort that doesn’t often find its way onto the stage at events like these - bringing a healthy dose of jokey showmanship and what appeared to be a loosely-rehearsed bit with late night TV host Carson Daly (a Demand Media spokesperson).

Ostensibly focused on its title, “Next Generation Web: What Lies Ahead for Hosting,” the enjoyably brief (I would estimate approximately 20 minutes) keynote was, despite Rosenblatt’s claims to the contrary, basically a run-through of what Demand Media does. The conflict, however, was forgivable in that Rosenblatt appears to believe very firmly that what Demand Media does is, in fact, what lies ahead for hosting.

Demand Media’s most notable offering, at the moment, is a repackaging of the .tv domain as a sort presence-building product via video and social networking technology, through the site ChannelMe.tv. The company offers a $25-per-year package that includes a .tv domain and a template-based package for constructing a personal video channel (in the vein of an evolved MySpace) using social networking tools and functions for “grabbing” video content from other sources (such as YouTube).

The company’s plan for profiting from these channels involves directing traffic to Demand Media-owned properties featuring particularly targeted user-generated content (a gardening-oriented social network was one example).

While the ideas Rosenblatt presented didn’t quite cause the building to crumble around us, they were forward-thinking enough to catch the attention, and the admiration, of some very savvy Web hosting industry folks.

Later that evening, more than one person assured me that Rosenblatt gets it.

By that, I imagine these people mean that he doesn’t view hosting as it was or as it is, but how it ought to be. Not surprisingly, quite a few of the people I’ve spoken to at HostingCon have ideas about how hosting ought to be.

Rosenblatt’s opinion certainly is worth noting.

His point is that there is a whole market of consumers, and even businesses, that is now used to dealing with hosting without ever realizing that they’re dealing with “hosting.” They use services like MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube or any of dozens of others, to host their content on the Web, without ever paying for it, and without ever deciding on a disk space allotment or worrying about bandwidth.

Selling services to this market is an undertaking entirely separate from selling a dedicated server to a developer. To illustrate, Rosenblatt played a promo clip from the ChannelMe.tv site during his presentation. In the video, Daly describes the product with phrases like “naming your channel” and “grabbing video” never once mentioning, said Rosenblatt, that he’s selling you a domain name.