Comments on: Demand Media raises $120 million for a bunch of shell Websites

By: Ed Delia

Ed Delia — Wed, 03 May 2006 12:22:35 +0000

There’s got to be more to it. Otherwise . . . well, he did OK with MySpace.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 03 May 2006 10:45:25 +0000

Lots of people do this (w/o $120MM I might add); the search engines usually consider them spammers, and block the sites when they find them. The prospects for this venture look severely limited if Yahoo!, Google and MSN kick these pages out of their search engines. When I was at Yahoo! we took a very dim view of a site that posted no unique content and just tried to use duplicate content (RSS news feeds, etc.) as an excuse to show ads (and no special treatment if they were Yahoo!’s Overture ads).

By: Lee C.

Lee C. — Wed, 03 May 2006 10:27:33 +0000

Sounds like the Seinfeld of Web 2.0 – a website about nothing.

By: Common Sense

Common Sense — Tue, 02 May 2006 17:55:32 +0000

Makes perfect sense if you understand that the parked domain business is 10% of Google’s business. AdSense in parked domains is Googles quiet cash cow. Yahoo does the same type of feeds.

By: Matt Marshall

Matt Marshall — Tue, 02 May 2006 17:15:48 +0000

I’m at a loss too. Especially when there are other companies out there already doing similar things.

Advertising bubble in full stretch?

By: Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh Shah — Tue, 02 May 2006 16:58:39 +0000

I’m not exactly I understand why this business model takes $120 million of capital, but I may be missing something.

Call me simple minded, but I just don’t get where the value is.

By: Blowhard

Blowhard — Tue, 02 May 2006 15:36:41 +0000

That is a great strategy, as long as step one is:
Rewind clock back to 1996

By: Terry Whalen

Terry Whalen — Tue, 02 May 2006 10:19:26 +0000

It’s certainly feasible that this strategy could work. Using AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network, a web site owner can typically generate $.01 to $.03 in advertising revenue for each user page visit. So, to generate $150k/yr would require 7.5 million page views per year, or 20,500 page views per day. If the avg visitor views 5 pages or so, then this would require 4,000 visitors per day, which is not all that much traffic.