WHIR TV recently interviewed Richard, but the site only produced a transcript because the audio had some problems.  The interview covered Richard’s history, what Demand Media does, and where its going as a social media company.  WHIR TV described what Demand Media does as clever because it is essentially selling Web hosting and domaining in the form of a social media site for consumers. 

I pulled some questions and responses that I liked in particular.  Check these out in addition to the link to the full interview after the jump!

WHIR TV: Why the focus on the .tv extension?

RR: We thought about .com because it’s so widespread. We thought about the other TLDs. In the end we said, “You know what? Out of all the other domains out there besides .com, .tv is the most understandable. Globally, in almost every country in the world TV means the same thing, it means television and video.” So if we made a video centric tool, like Channelme.tv, which is all about grabbing your own videos and expressing yourself, we thought it was the perfect domain to tie to those tools.

WHIR TV: In terms of ChannelMe.tv how can businesses best utilize it to market who they are and benefit their businesses?

RR: There are a lot of businesses that buy their own .tv and post videos around a certain topic. For example, there is a channel called chocolatechipcookies.tv and what this user does is she grabs videos of how to make the best chocolate chip cookies from YouTube, MySpace and other hosting sites and she puts them up on her site. What this does is garner leads of people who are interested in chocolate chip cookies and I believe what she’s doing now is selling direct-to-ship her own homemade chocolate chip cookies. So anyone looking for this topic will search for it on Google and they’ll find her because she’s aggregating content and is listed high because she’s part of our network, they’ll come to her and now she has a new customer that she can now communicate with through blogs, friends lists, profiles etc.

To read the full interview, follow this link.