If you're one of the thousands of potential entrepreneurs who want to make their mark on the Internet, you need to understand where things are going and there's no place better to do that than at the annual Web 2.0 Summit, which took place last week in San Francisco. Unless, like my grad students last night, you get the chance to have a conversation with CEO/founder Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media, arguably the person who knows more about how to deliver unique content to users in a way that is meaningful to them than almost anyone today. That's because his company in just 3 short years has not only become the leading producer of unique content on the Web through its network of freelance creators, it is also the undisputed leader in distributed social media, powering the conversations of 3 billion users on sites such as USA Today, Fox News, and CNN.
Rosenblatt is convinced that "content is the key to the future of the Web" and he's staked his company on it Combine unique content that addresses a particular user need with a mechanism (social media platforms) for collecting user intelligence and you have something very powerful and transformative. Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle, the Web 2.0 Summit guys, couldn't agree more. For the recent Summit they put together a Web Squared White Paper in which they assert that today opportunities on the Web come from "managing, understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated data in real time." This creates a huge competitive advantage for the company that is able to do it effectively. How does it happen? If you're Demand Media, it happens through distributed social media technology that enables companies to gather relevant user intelligence. But O'Reilly and Batelle also claim that advances in smartphones, which have turned our cameras and phones into eyes and ears, as well as the increasingly widespread deployment of sensors are combining with users to produce huge volumes of data that can be transformed into competitive intelligence.
Demand Media has leveraged the power of collective intelligence on a huge scale, something that most first-time entrepreneurs could not achieve. It's the advantage that Rosenblatt brings from having been a serial entrepreneur who thinks big. Whether it was the launch of iMall in 1994 (sold in 1999), the first e-commerce shopping mall; the sale of Intermix/MySpace to Newscorp; or the funding of Demand Media to the tune of $350 million so he could acquire key Internet properties and grow fast, Rosenblatt now finds himself at the center of one of the most important revolutions of our time--the collision of the Web 2.0 world with the physical world. More about that later, but think about this. Traditional newspapers are now coming to Demand Media for unique content for their print media. We do live in an amazing time with more opportunity than you can image. If you want to hear Richard's talk at the Web 2.0 Summit, check it out here. Opportunity is still out there on the Web but you have to be smart and you have to be fast.
