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.

Helium Marketplace: Make Money Writing Online

Helium is a directory of user generated articles. Anyone can submit an article to any of 24 different categories (arts, autos, politics, etc.). Articles can be submitted directly to channels, entered into contests, or as part of a debate. Since Helium’s launch last October the site has gotten over 69,000 writers and accumulated over 400,000 articles on 60,000 topics.

Over the past couple of months they’ve been running a pilot program for new “Marketplace” service that connects authors and publishers. Today, they’re officially launching the service. Using “Marketplace”, publishers can list bounties for articles they want written. Authors then submit their stories following the publisher’s writing guidelines and compete for the bounty. Publishers can select any of the articles as the winner, although Helium’s peer review ratings help rank the list. Payments per article range from $20 to over $100, with 20% transaction fee going to Helium.

For the pilot they have 14 publishers listing about 10 bounties a piece. In September they expect to have over 1000 publishers on the system.