Richard Rosenblatt wants to be clear: He’s not interested in being chief executive of Yahoo Inc.
Since Jerry Yang announced he was stepping down from the post, speculation has swirled on who will replace him. One name that surfaced several times in Internet rumor mills is Rosenblatt’s, chief executive and founder of Demand Media Inc., a Santa Monica Internet publishing company that owns niche-interest Web sites.
But Rosenblatt insists he isn’t jumping ship.
“I think Yahoo is a great company that has a lot of potential,” Rosenblatt told the Business Journal. “But here at Demand Media, we just raised $350 million in venture funding. We’ve got an incredible team and a great opportunity. It wouldn’t make sense to leave under any circumstances.”
Rosenblatt, 39, said he hasn’t been contacted directly by anyone from Yahoo about becoming top dog at the Sunnyvale-based company.
But he said “a number of people” around the company have tried to gauge his interest ever since Yang rejected Microsoft Corp.’s $46 billion offer to acquire Yahoo in June. The announcement of Yang’s resignation in mid-November followed the flack he took for that decision.
Rosenblatt said he’s been firm turning down all inquiries, adding, “I’m very happy here.”
Rosenblatt’s track record was undoubtedly what drew the attention of Yahoo backers. He was chief executive of Intermix Media Inc., the company that owned MySpace, and was instrumental in selling the social networking site to News Corp.
Rosenblatt has also turned Demand Media into an Internet powerhouse, making the company an attractive acquisition target for Yahoo. Recently there was speculation that Yahoo wanted to buy Demand Media along with online chatter of top Yahoo executives visiting the company’s offices.
Rosenblatt, though, shot down ideas of a merger: “We’re not interested in selling.”
Micro Music
Will a phenomenon that’s raked in dollars for photography agencies also work for a sound effects company?
Ryan Born and his Sherman Oaks-based startup, AudioMicro Inc., plan to find out. Born’s company invites artists from around the world to upload stock music, sound effects and production cues to AudioMicro.com.
Film producers can then download the tracks from AudioMicro for use in movie clips. Customers pay Born for downloads, and he pays artists a fee every time their clips are purchased.
The model is based on “microstock,” a recent online business model developed by photography agencies: Photographers upload photos to Web sites and the agencies offer them for sale at lower rates than traditional agencies. The photographers are paid a modest commission when the agencies sell their images.
Born, a former vice president at an entertainment photography firm, was impressed when iStockPhoto, one of the original microstock agencies, was purchased by Getty Images Inc. for $50 million in 2006, so he decided to try to use the model for audio.
Born founded AudioMicro last year and recently raised $500,000 in Series A funding from DFJ Frontier. He said the service appeals to people he terms “microproducers”: amateurs or producers with low-budget films who want professional-grade sound effects.
“If you’re a small video maker or doing PowerPoint for internal use, there’s no way for you to get music that’s within your price point,” said Born, AudioMicro’s chief executive and its sole employee.
Among AudioMicro’s clients so far have been a video blogger for the New York Times, a chainsaw manufacturing company and a government PR firm, Born said.
Born declined to release revenue figures, but said they tripled in November.
AudioMicro currently has 25,000 tracks on its site, and Born projected it would more than double in the next three months.
No Deal
It looks like there won’t be any bailout for Internet music company ArtistDirect Inc.
Earlier this fall, ArtistDirect, a failed music label backed by Interscope Records co-founder Ted Field, agreed to sell itself to Coghill Capital Management LLC for the bargain-basement price of $2.8 million.
But the deal is off, according to documents filed recently with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Coghill gave notice that it intends to withdraw from its original statement of intent to acquire ArtistDirect. The company did not give a reason, and a representative said Coghill would not
comment.
Dimitri Villard, ArtistDirect’s interim chief executive, also declined to comment.
Under the terms of the deal, ArtistDirect now owes Coghill a $140,000 breakup fee. It’s another blow to ArtistDirect, which lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a record label and in recent years has tried and failed to reinvent itself as an anti-piracy software company and an Internet music site.
But the company’s revenues have
continued to slide. To date this year, the company has lost almost $45 million, according to filings.
Staff reporter Charles Proctor can be reached at [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230.
