Growing Demand

What do domains have to do with social media and engaging content?

In previous posts here, we’ve discussed our company’s leadership in social media, our Demand Studios content creation capabilities, and our network of branded websites that bring the best of these worlds together.  As many of you know we also have a profitable domain registrar business, and one question that we occasionally hear is “How does your registrar business connect with your focus on social media and content?”

They’re actually much more relevant than you might think. It starts with the lessons we’ve learned firsthand in developing our own network of branded sites like eHow.com and LIVESTRONG.com.  By building out our sites with top quality content and engaging social media experiences, Demand Media has been able to grow those sites’ traffic 10x and become a Top 20 online media property.

Now we’re taking that formula for success – the same one that’s helped us build our network to more than 90 million monthly visitors – and beginning to make it available to our domain partners and consumers.

The opportunity for this is vast.  The gap between total available domains and active domains is wide and growing wider.  As reported by Netcraft, over 100 million domains currently lay fallow, each one a potential web site waiting to happen, lacking only the right acquisition and monetization tools to make it profitable.

We already offer those acquisition tools through our eNom and BulkRegister registrar brands (the second largest registrar group in the world), as well as traffic monetization tools through our Hotkeys brand.  Now we’re taking the next step – turning domains into web sites, with the help of quality content.

Our first offering to capitalize on this potential was RichContent, a simple, self-serve way for domain owners to add high quality, contextually-relevant content to their sites.  In coming months, we’ll continue introducing new capabilities that leverage the complete Demand Media platform – our Pluck social media tools favored by major publisher brands, our Demand Studios content library growing at a rate of 4,000 units per day, and our domains platform that services more than 11 million domains – all to offer our customers customizable, all-in-one solutions to manage the lifecycle and monetization of their domains.