Demand Media Takes $100 Million Series C

Domain holding company Demand Media has taken $100 million Series C funding in a round led by Goldman Sachs that included 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Spectrum Equity Investors. The new round takes Demand Media’s total funding to the rather extraordinary figure of $320 million and values Demand Media at $1 billion.

Demand Media is primary a domaining company that is focused on building a profitable domain portfolio which includes everything from generic names through to typos. Like a number in this business lately, Demand Media has started a value adding program for their domain portfolio, having launched social network Me.TV in May. Demand Media is headed by former MySpace CEO Richard Rosenblatt.

Whilst often being tarred with the domain hijacking brush, domaining has become a big business with serious money over the last couple of years. The sale of Business.com for $350million has seen renewed interest from tradition investors who are looking for similar flipping opportunities.

But Demand Media is also buying other online properties, including pure content plays. They have new competition from Ross Levinsohn and Jonathan Miller, who recently created their own fund, backed by General Atlantic, to acquire some of the same properties that Demand Media will be interested in.

NoSo - Backlash Against Our “Always On” Culture

“Meet no friends, attend no events and make no connections.”

NoSo, short for No Social, is more of an art project and cultural backlash than an actual startup. You join, get a user number (everything is anonymous) and then create and/or join “NoSo’s,” which are held wherever the organizer chooses to have it: parks, cafes, street corners and other public places.

Other users come, but people “meet without meeting.” Users arrive alone, unplugged and aren’t allowed talk to anyone, presumably taking comfort in the fact that other NoSo users are there sharing their experience. “Allow the NoSo experience to envelope you,” the site suggests. The video on the home page of the site describes the other details. A sample event is here.

It’s an obvious play on Flash Mobs, although, of course, without publicity.

This also appears to be a semi-serious endeavor.. The NoSo founders (Artists Christina Ray and Kurt Bigenho) were interviewed by 10ZenMonkeys:

We invite people to take a break from their every day experiences carrying around laptops and cellphones, and give them the chance to just disengage from the noise, the social network, the constant communication that’s going on around us all the time. We let them just experience the absence of that — the feeling of being without all those distractions. And a NoSo could happen in a number of different places. It could happen on a street corner, or in a cafe, or in an installation in a gallery setting.