When serial internet entrepreneur Richard Rosenblatt sets out to do something, he delivers. As the chairman of MySpace, he saw the potential to build the world’s most populous social media site, which eventually sold to News Corp for $650m. And in London on a sunny July evening, he promised to demystify social media for a rapt audience of more than 100 leading figures in the European media sector.
His messages were clear and compelling: social media is everywhere, and every media business needs to think like a community and content company, engaging users to generate and enhance content or provide them with social networking experiences. From giants such as Fox and Sky that are adding user-generated content to news, through to the ‘long tail’ of sites that cater to niche audiences, interaction on the web is generating the online footfall that advertisers crave.
Demand Media: Success through Verticals
Richard’s latest venture, 3i-backed Demand Media, owns over 65 ‘vertical’ websites and attracts nearly 70m visitors a month. They’re drawn by the sites’ focus on areas of specialist interest, such as golf and travel, and the opportunity the sites provide to create reviews, interact with fellow enthusiasts – and earn money by writing articles that Demand Media knows will interest its audiences.
By harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, Demand Media’s sites add 3,000 pieces of valuable content a day and are the leading destinations in their fields, while deploying minimal resources behind the scenes.
The recent purchase of Pluck, the top provider of social media tools, enables Demand Media to integrate even more interactivity into its sites while preserving the heritage features users love. Pluck also provides its tools to mainstream media, allowing them to provide a read-write experience for their customers – clients of Pluck include Sky, The Guardian, USA Today and The Economist.
Specialist sites pay dividends – because although a golfing site may have fewer users than Facebook, the focus of interest makes its members a far more finely-targeted prospect for advertisers. On a night when newspaper billboards told of ‘Homes, shares, jobs in turmoil’, Richard’s financial message was simple: ‘The offline economy may be in trouble but that’s not what we’re seeing online at all.’
Marrying Social Media to Quality Content
Ultimately, Richard’s talk highlighted the importance of both social media and quality content. Users now expect to read views, express themselves and interact on any site they visit. But they also expect to find useful content. In Richard’s words, ‘Content is marketing’ – because useful content drives free traffic from the search engines that dominate people’s online journeys.
In total, Richard estimates that about two thirds of his sites’ traffic comes from Google and other search engines, not through paid ads but because the sites naturally rise high in the rankings due to their size and age, and the volume of useful content.
Perhaps the most intriguing of the audience questions came when Richard was asked which he’d rather run: a traditional content provider aiming to add social media to its site or a social media site aiming to generate useful content. Richard opted for the richness of the content provider, demonstrating that there’s hope for long-established media companies yet, provided they apply the power of social media – or, as Richard also calls it, ‘the next operating system of the entire web’. Taking up that charge, Pluck has clearly positioned itself as the obvious partner for media companies looking to seize the social opportunity.