FIM Sells Non My-Space Intermix Assets, Technology To Former CEO Rosenblatt's Demand Media
You're reading it here first ... Richard Rosentblatt, who engineered the attention-getting sale of Intermix and its chief asset MySpace.com, has acquired assets of Intermix Network LLC from Fox Interactive Media for his Demand Media.
Context & Ripple Effects
Richard Rosenblatt ran Intermix when he engineered the sale of the company and its flagship MySpace.com to what became Fox Interactive Media, then left to found Demand Media. This deal closes that loop: FIM is selling him back the non-My-Space remainder of Intermix Network LLC — the assets and technology News Corp did not consider core to the social network it paid up for.
The structure matters more than the price tag, which goes unreported here: the buyer is the seller's own former CEO, buying the parts of his old company that the acquirer explicitly deprioritized. That is a clean read on what Fox values about Intermix (MySpace alone) versus what Rosenblatt believes still has value (everything else).
First-order effects
- Fox Interactive Media sheds the non-MySpace Intermix properties and technology, concentrating its post-acquisition portfolio on MySpace itself while monetizing assets it evidently had no plans to develop.
- Demand Media, roughly a year into its existence under Rosenblatt, acquires working web assets and technology rather than building from scratch — an unusually fast base of traffic infrastructure for a startup led by someone who knows exactly what he is buying.
Second-order effects
- Rosenblatt effectively reassembles his former company minus the crown jewel, giving Demand Media an established audience footprint that competitors starting from zero cannot match at the same speed.
- For other large acquirers of roll-up networks, the sale sets a template: non-core assets bought alongside a marquee property need not be operated — they can be resold, even back to the seller's own founder, rather than integrated or shut down.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern holds, big-media acquisitions of multi-property networks will increasingly be judged on the one asset that justified the deal, with everything else treated as liquidation inventory — pressuring founders to separate their best property before any sale.
- The deal also sketches an emerging division of labor in consumer web media: traditional conglomerates buy scale and brand (MySpace), while entrepreneur-led operators like Demand Media aggregate the long tail of smaller sites and rebuild them around cheaper production models.
The trend: Post-acquisition pruning is becoming standard practice in web-media M&A, with conglomerates keeping the marquee asset and returning non-core properties to founder-led operators who build scaled content businesses on them.