Demand's fundraising throughout its four-year history totals $355 million altogether; investors include the aforementioned Goldman as well as Oak Investment Partners, Spectrum Equity Investors and Generation Partners. Founder Richard Rosenblatt, former MySpace chairman, raised an initial round of $120 million in May of 2006 with the idea of buying up popular domain names, filling them with affordable content and monetizing that content through ad sales.
Demand Media now focuses on distributed social conversations around professionally created content on a network of partner sites that reach millions of users. Sites include eHow.com and LIVESTRONG.com.
In this video from October 2009, Rosenblatt tells Vator.tv's Bambi Francisco about revenues, the importance of his company's acquisition of Pluck in 2008 and the upcoming IPO. "We want to build this into a very big, standalone company. We believe we're the size that we can go public, but we have to make sure that accelerates the business[...] If 2010 is a good year, we'll consider it."