When Richard Rosenblatt talks, we listen. The man who once served as the former chief of MySpace creator Intermix Media heads one of the most heavily funded and high-profile venture-backed companies, Demand Media Inc.
Since co-founding the company in 2006, he’s built a big business with an audacious and controversial strategy to create thousands of niche content sites targeted at search engines, and to buy millions of generic Web sites with highly-trafficked domain names. In multiple interviews with various publications over the past couple of years, Rosenblatt stated that Demand Media is profitable and suggested that revenue reached about $200 million in 2009.
So when Demand Media filed for an IPO on Friday, we eagerly pored through the 187-page filing–only to find that while the company’s revenue last year was close to $200 million its bottom line was deep in the red. That certainly doesn’t sound like the profitable company that Rosenblatt has repeatedly described.
• Read the full Venture Capital Dispatch story.
