Richard Rosenblatt and the business of letting go

The shopkeepers kept asking for changes. A store needed another adjustment, another update, another small piece of attention from the people who had built it. At iMall, Richard Rosenblatt encountered a difficulty familiar to anyone who has ever sold a service: customers have an inexhaustible supply of opinions about their own businesses.

His answer was to let them do the work themselves. Give merchants tools to change their online stores, and the people with the strongest interest in getting the details right could get on with it. A queue of requests became a product idea. The customer, that celebrated inconvenience, could become part of the machinery.

That episode offers a useful way into Rosenblatt’s career. The acquisitions make a louder entrance. The storefront makes more sense of what followed: personal profiles, useful articles, television communities, software for buying and selling entertainment. Across those businesses, he has returned to the relationship between people who want something and platforms that help them act on it.

A law degree with an early exit

Rosenblatt grew up in Southern California and studied at UCLA before earning his law degree at USC in 1994. Business had already interrupted the conventional sequence. Before law school, he ran an advertising firm with 20 employees. His legal career lasted about six months before he left to pursue iMall. The diploma survived the change of plan.

There is something revealing in that order. He had customers before he had a legal qualification. Studying law supplied a way of examining a problem; operating a business supplied problems that refused to remain theoretical. His later career would involve contracts, acquisitions and public companies, so the training had plenty of opportunities to make itself useful.

iMall made the web practical for merchants who needed a storefront rather than a lesson in computing. Its partnerships connected software to businesses that already had things to sell. By 1999, First Data was helping bring merchants online, while Excite@Home wanted shopping services for its audience. A seemingly small tool sat between retailers, payments and distribution.

Excite@Home acquired iMall in 1999. The transaction was paid in stock, a detail that deserves to survive the celebratory version of the story. A sale can establish the value of a company at a particular moment. It does not turn every subsequent movement in the buyer’s share price into cash in the seller’s pocket.

The profile replaced the shop window

In February 2004, Rosenblatt was appointed chief executive of eUniverse, later called Intermix Media. The assignment was broader than a single social network: bring focus and improve profitability across a collection of internet businesses. Myspace was part of that collection. Rosenblatt served as its chairman; Chris DeWolfe was its CEO.

In July 2005, News Corporation announced an agreement to acquire Intermix for approximately $580 million in cash. The purchase included Myspace and more than 30 other sites. The distinction matters. A parent company, its subsidiary and the people running each had become compressed into one famous internet transaction. Corporate charts rarely travel as well as a memorable price.

Myspace extended the storefront idea into identity. People could arrange their own pages, publish their interests and gather around music and friends. The software gave them room to make decisions. That freedom also gave the service something a centrally written website could not easily order into existence: countless reasons for people to return.

Rosenblatt had encountered online identity through Superdudes, a gaming community where users created characters. The transition from a fictional character to a personal profile interested him because the underlying behavior was familiar. People wanted some control over their surroundings. On the web, decoration could become participation, and participation could become a business.

When the audience started assigning the articles

With Shawn Colo, Rosenblatt co-founded Demand Media in 2006. Its properties included eHow and Cracked, alongside a domain business. The company approached publishing with an unusual starting point: the questions people were already asking online. Search behavior could indicate an audience before a writer had been assigned a subject.

Demand Studios combined automated selection with human production. Software assessed possible subjects using signals such as traffic and advertising potential. Editors reviewed titles, freelancers chose assignments, and work passed through checking and editing before publication. By late 2009, the operation was producing about 4,000 pieces of content a day. It turned the humble how-to into an industrial scheduling problem.

The model invited an argument about quality. Rosenblatt pointed to the professional backgrounds of contributors and their choice to work with Demand. Critics questioned whether a system built for such volume could consistently serve readers well. Both the editorial process and the incentives behind it mattered. A procedure could exist, and people could still disagree about the results.

In 2010, Rosenblatt appeared at the D8 conference alongside Paul Steiger of ProPublica. Their businesses made a useful pairing: an advertising-supported operation producing material at scale and a nonprofit devoted to investigative reporting. The question of what online publishing should pay for was sufficiently unsettled to put both on the same stage.

Demand Media went public in 2011. Its dependence on Google also became a difficulty as changes to the search engine’s algorithms affected referrals. Rosenblatt left the chairman and CEO roles in October 2013. The company’s shares had fallen 44 percent over the preceding year. Demand had demonstrated how much a publisher could learn from search demand, and how exposed it could be to search distribution.

“I’m so optimistic, but knowing that you can fail makes you a better executive.”

Richard Rosenblatt, speaking at USC in 2009

He had voiced that qualification before the IPO and before his departure. It gives his optimism some useful friction. A career containing several company sales can look inevitable when reduced to a biography. Operating through changing markets feels different. The next product still has to persuade someone to use it.

Television, followed by the paperwork

Whipclip began in 2014. It offered television viewers a way to share short, licensed moments from shows. The initial proposition was close to ordinary fan behavior: watch something, want someone else to see it, pass it along. Building a company around that habit also required agreements with the people who owned the programming.

The business changed. The acquisition of the French startup TVShow Time brought a community where viewers tracked episodes, discussed shows and discovered things to watch. TV Time gave enthusiastic viewers something to do after an episode ended. Those voluntary interactions also offered a view of audience engagement across an increasingly fragmented television market.

By January 2020, the company said TV Time had recorded more than 15 billion episodes watched. That was a historical total from a tracking service, rather than a claim that everyone watching television had been measured. The distinction is useful: an engaged community can reveal preferences without representing the whole audience.

Mediamorph added content management and transaction capabilities. Together, the businesses could connect audience information with the decisions surrounding entertainment distribution. Which show might suit a particular market? Where should it be licensed? The proposition moved behind the television screen, into the offices where content had to earn its place on a platform.

Whip Media raised $50 million in January 2020, bringing reported funding to $115 million. Rosenblatt’s ambition was to help match programming to platforms, countries and audiences. The storefront entrepreneur was now dealing with entertainment inventory. The customers had changed considerably. The need to make complicated decisions manageable remained familiar.

The founder makes room

In June 2023, Whip Media announced Carol Hanley’s promotion to CEO and Rosenblatt’s appointment as executive chair. Hanley had spent six years at the company and had been president since 2021. The announcement credited her with expanding customer relationships and doubling worldwide revenues. It placed an operator’s work beside the founder’s history.

In February 2025, Welby Chen succeeded Hanley as CEO. Whip Media had traveled from a consumer clipping application to software for the business of content, and its leadership had moved on as well. The founding idea and the current organization were separated by years of acquisitions, changes of emphasis and other people’s decisions.

Rosenblatt’s own roles widened. He co-founded Autograph with a group that included Tom Brady; its January 2022 funding announcement listed both as co-chairmen. He also co-founded Adim with Rob McElhenney and other collaborators. In October 2022, a16z crypto brought him in as a senior advisor. Each put him near another attempt to connect entertainment, technology and participation.

Back in the room where stories are sold

In May 2025, Rosenblatt joined Lionsgate’s board. His connections also include Imagine Entertainment and an advisory relationship with DraftKings. Fifth Down lists him as chairman of its advisory board. These are different responsibilities from running a startup day to day, but they keep him close to the commercial arrangements around audiences and entertainment.

The career resists a tidy victory lap. Demand Media’s search exposure belongs beside the Myspace transaction. Whipclip’s evolution belongs beside Whip Media’s enterprise business. Change is part of the record, rather than an awkward interval between accomplishments. A useful idea may lead to a company whose eventual customers would surprise its earliest users.

Return to the merchant waiting for a web-page update. Rosenblatt’s practical response was to move a decision toward the person who cared about it. Decades later, his career still offers versions of that question: who wants to participate, what is stopping them, and can a business make it easier? The shopkeeper, at least, could finally change the window.