Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong gets a boost from Demand Media

Bicycle racing champion Lance Armstrong is going dot-com in a big way.

The seven-time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor is teaming with Santa Monica-based Demand Media on a for-profit website that helps users stay on track with fitness and weight-loss goals.

LiveStrong.com, a spinoff of Armstrong’s nonprofit site LiveStrong.org, is scheduled to emerge from a test version tonight.

LiveStrong.com will be run by Demand Media, with Armstrong and his Lance Armstrong Foundation getting undisclosed stakes in that new-media company.

Armstrong’s foundation will also get the right to use some of Demand Media’s software tools for connecting users on the LiveStrong.org volunteer site.

Like some smaller health sites, LiveStrong.com offers space for food and exercise diaries. But it also has social-networking features to connect users to those with similar goals and a trove of text and video content that is produced by paid freelancers.

The structure is partly based on TheDailyPlate.com, a food and fitness site already owned by Demand Media. Founded two years ago, Demand Media has raised $355 million from private investors and spent some of that to acquire how-to sites EHow and ExpertVillage and various special-interest sites.

Demand Media is led by Richard Rosenblatt, best known for selling Intermix Media Inc., the parent of MySpace, to News Corp. for $580 million in 2005. Armstrong met Rosenblatt last year, after Rosenblatt joined the board of an energy drink maker, FRS Co., in which Armstrong is an investor and director.

-- Joseph Menn

Photo: Lance Armstrong with his children in 2005 after winning his seventh Tour de France. Credit: Peter Dejong / Associated Press

Comments

[dp]

The Daily Plate is great, it sounds like it'll be more helpful with the other LiveStrong features.

[vadkins]

LiveSTRONG is a super website with terrific how-to videos. Rokosz Media (www.wearehdtv.com) partnered with Demand Media to produce many of these videos.

[Kate]

Am surprised someone who is as squeaky clean as Lance would partner with Demand Media who are....not. The recently acquired a site called The Daily Plate a food recording site which got most of its content from scraping from other sites. See attached URL above.

All this does is taint the LiveStrong name which in the long term is not smart.

[Joy Miller]

I am a paying member of daily plate and loved it. Now the site I use daily is BLOATED with too many menus and sub menus and bars, not to mention a livestrong banner on everything. Oh and now this paying member has to look at ADS for bumblebee tuna and the like. What was the point of paying dailyplate?

This new site is riddled with bugs and features that simply do not work. Fire the designer AND the programmers!

Have ZERO interest in Lance Armstrong's site, too. Wish there is a way to click into the dailyplate section and have it primarily be dailyplate and not have that hijacked feel...