We Love eNom for the Data: Rosenblatt
eNom brings in revenue — but also notable data — for Demand Media.
Yesterday Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt discussed his business at the All Things D conference. When describing the business, he noted that there are essentially two sides: domains and content.
But what was particularly interesting regarding the domains side is the value it brings to the firm. Sure, eNom brings in recurring revenue. But beyond the money is the data:
The third reason we really like [the registrar business] is since of the data, right, almost 10% of the entire web hits our servers on these 10 million domains, so in a world like the web where everybody’s everywhere and you’re trying to figure out what people are doing, particularly in the long tail, we think this is a really exciting source of…data.
In other words, Demand Media can use traffic data to its clients’ domains for figuring out what people are looking for in the long tail, and carry that over to its content business for deciding what content to produce.
Rosenblatt also stated that the content business is 50% bigger in terms of revenue than the domain business. The content business includes properties such as eHow, Cracked, and Trails, but also domain name parking. He stated less than 10% of the content business is revenue from parked domain names. He also gave a nod to the value of domain parking.
“If someone types in tenniselbow.com, they have tennis elbow,” he noted.
He also addressed the issue of reliance on Google for search traffic. Rosenblatt stated many of Demand Media’s sites, such as Cracked and Livestrong, get less than half of their traffic from search.
