More on the Demand Media story and and recent investment infusion over there.. this time from Forbes.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/09/26/myspace-online-media-tech-cz_eb_0926demandmedia.html
Richard.. great shot of you. Cool, cool.
This entry was posted by Frank Schilling on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 5:56 PM and is filed under
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Just incredible! Even the Weather Channel is buying domain names…..I need to get a piece of the action.
Weather Channel Buys LakeRentals.com
This deal seems to be more about SEO and domains than anything else. Weather Channel has acquired LakeRentals.com and its sister site CoastRentals.com which it has already rolled up into its ForGetaway.com portal. LakeRentals.com is a Columbia, MO-based company that was founded in 2005 by Brock and Brant Bukowsky and Nathaniel Broughton. Since launching, traffic on the sites has increased by an average of 20% each month, they say primarily from search engine ranking.
http://press.weather.com/index.php/press_releases/157.html
Frank,
Demand Media definitely has been taken to a new level, but I have a quick question/comment about their channelme.com/me.tv
It doesn’t seem to be making quite the waves and headway I thought they would, at least it doesn’t appear that way mainstream. Myspace.com – Everywhere
Facebook.com – Everywhere
me.tv ??
Do you think Richard has a grand ace up his sleeve that just hasn’t revealed itself yet?
Dotcom is king yes, but Richard Rosenblatt is no dummy either, his ventures have been outstanding.
***FS*** I don’t have a ton of visibility into the day-to-day machinations at the co but I do know they have been on an acquisition tear and many of the co’s they’ve acquired have been outstanding. They are buying the right assets relatively cheaply .. strategic undervalued cos and they are building value. It’s like large scale domaining with a corporate twist. They are not going to get everything right and I think the .tv stuff is a distraction.
Frank,
I admire your enthusiasm however I have never seen you mention the true colors of what Demand Media is trying to accomplish. Demand Media is in domain name business and with a company like eNom, it is a conflict of interest.
I have read many stories on domain forums where eNom has been involved in shady business practices. However, what hit me was when I was the one targeted. From my perspective they are defrauding their customers on the very name that built their company to what it is today. Create a new account on eNom and push your domain to the new account so your client can take over the domain and boom enom blocks the name, changes the whois to their protection and changes the nameservers to park their domains. You have to wait 45 minutes on the phone to get a rude customer service rep on the phone.
I have read in the past you have communicated via your blog how you could help the domain industry, and I think (and I feel) that the proper method of doing that would be understand that Demand Media is creating its value by cheating the very clients that built the company.
***FS*** Adil.. there are two sides to every user experience.. registrars are always trying to improve their bottom line by charging for services that were formerly free. It could be that your experience at enom stems from something like that, or perhaps from changes in the user interface.. I do not think the folks at enom would try to shuffle names away from their customer in the middle of the night. If I thought that I would close my accounts there and use every opportunity to speak against it on this blog and publicly.
I understand from you/others that Demand Media’s registrars (enom/bulkregister) are keeping certain domain names from being deleted after registrants allow their registrations to lapse for non-payment, but as far as I know, Enom is not playing dirtier than that by blocking latecoming registrants from reclaiming their names or through other shenanigans. Feel free to post specifics if you have evidence to the contrary and I’ll blog about it.