Demand Media was created in 2006 by a former private equity investor, Shawn Colo, and the former chairman of MySpace, Richard Rosenblatt.

[11] Society6.com, which it acquired in June 2013,[12] provides an online commerce platform to sell images or designs on consumer products.

[11] In 2017, Leaf Group acquired Deny Designs, a modern home furnishings company based in Colorado.

[16] In June 2007, Demand Media hired Charles Hilliard, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, NetZero/United Online senior executive and initial public offering (IPO) specialist, as its president and chief financial officer[17] and acquired Byron Reese's how-to website, ExpertVillage.com of Austin, Texas, for about $20 million.

On June 10, 2021, Leaf announced shareholders had approved an acquisition by Graham Holdings for $8.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $323 million.

[26] Since 2006, Demand Media has acquired a collection of sites and relaunched them with social networking features and video capabilities.

[29] In 2008, Demand Media acquired Pluck, a company providing social networking and commenting solutions to other websites, for a reported $75 million in cash.

[35] In August 2014, Demand Media announced it had successfully separated from Rightside Group, Ltd. and its brands eNom, Name.com and online auction site NameJet.

[41] Demand Media executives say their websites are content-driven to attract visitors by showing up in multiword search-engine queries.

The website owners get free content for their sites and split the advertising revenue with Demand Media.

In April 2010, the Financial Times reported that Demand Media was planning an initial public offering of shares (IPO).

Shares were initially expected to be offered in December 2010 that would give Demand Media a value of some $1.5 billion.

[46] However, as a result of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation regarding the company's novel accounting for "long-lived content", the pricing was delayed.

[48] Questions were raised about Demand Media's claim to be profitable, given that its IPO filings had reported losses for the past several years.

[55][56] Demand Media has also been criticized for its methods of accounting, such as capitalizing the costs of content and amortizing them over five years, giving them the appearance of profitability.