• Marketwatch, Friday, November 17, 2006 9:45 AM

After raising $200 million for a new venture called Demand Media, Richard Rosenblatt, the former MySpace chair who sold the net to News Corp. in 2005, believes he can replicate his former success. Now he's focusing more heavily on merging user-generated content with professional content. However, instead of publishing material in a mass way, Demand's focus will be on vertical segments, which in many ways are more attractive to advertisers. To encourage usage, it also plans to compensate all content producers.

Of course, the company is entering a rowded field that seems to be the focus of everyone from Google to CBS Corp., but Demand thinks it can achieve more by being smaller. Its plan is to buy even smaller vertical-specific companies and then provide users with better building and organizational tools for their content. It sounds vague, but the chaotic space of user-generated media would benefit from better organization, editing and centralization. Ease of consumption is ultimately what Web users want.

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