And lots of investors don’t care. I’d heard Demand’s public offering, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, was oversubscribed, and yesterday the company confirmed it: Demand said it had increased the size and price of the deal, selling 8.9 million shares at $17, instead of its initial plan to sell 7.5 million at $14 to $16.

That gives Richard Rosenblatt’s company a value, for the moment, of just under $1.5 billion–about the same as the New York Times.

Now everyone else gets to vote, when the shares list today, trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the DMD ticker.

It will be tempting to overestimate the meaning of the stock’s first-day movement (or in subsequent days, for that matter), so I’ll try hard not to. But we can at least agree that this the first big-name Web company to go public in a very, very long time.

So even if Demand’s business didn’t have anything to do with the media business, it would get plenty of scrutiny.

And, of course, Demand is in the media business, using a model that terrifies lots of people in the media business. It produces lots and lots of Google-ready content at very low prices, with the help of computer taskmasters and an army of freelancers.

Lucky for me! None of them write news stories about media companies going public. So I’ll make the most of the opportunity and check back in later today.

Actually, no need to: The not-at-all bashful entrepreneur has been working hard to make sure we’re all aware of what he’s calling “the Mahalo 4.0 launch/pivot.”

So there will be no shortage of places to read about this today. And if you want to hear Calacanis pitch his pivot himself, you can do that too, via a livestream of the DLD conference, where he’s presenting right now.

So here’s what you need to know:

• Calacanis, who launched Mahalo in 2007 as a “human-powered search engine,” then turned it into an “answers” site, is now trying to move deeper into the “how to” category dominated by Demand Media. Which just happens to be going public today in a very hot offering that will value the company at more than $1 billion. [Correction: Demand will start trading on Wednesday, January 26]
• The most important part of the move is a new emphasis on video, which Mahalo is creating itself. That’s a different strategy from Demand’s, which relies on a computer to spit out editorial assignments, then hands them out to an army of freelancers.
• Calacanis and Mahalo president Jason Rapp, who came on board last spring, have hired a team of 50 editors, who are now cranking out some 900 videos a week on topics like “How to Cook a Ham.” They plan to have a staff of 100 dedicated to videos by the end of the year.
• Mahalo still relies primarily on Google ads for revenue, which the company won’t disclose. But last week Calacanis said incoming dollars from Google’s YouTube have shot up 9x in the last year.
• Rapp says Mahalo still doesn’t need to raise any more money beyond its initial round, which brought in $20 million from investors like Sequoia, CBS and News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

If you missed Calacanis’s pitch this morning but still want to see people talking about his site, here’s a promo clip the company supplied. It features Calacanis’s employees, but not Calacanis, so it’s a lot less interesting. But you’ll get the idea.

Mahalo 4.0 from Mahalo.com on Vimeo.

But it seems a reach to say FTB is “social”–the company primarily relies on paid researchers to compile information tables on specific topics like GPS navigation systems or fast-food nutrition. Regular users are welcome to suggest topics and edits, but actual edits are only made by company staff and freelancers. (It’s kind of like Demand Media in chart form.)

A spokesperson for FTB said this morning that the company is planning to add more social stuff, but didn’t get more specific than that.

FTB is particularly notable because of its founder and CEO Kevin O’Connor, who also co-founded the ad network DoubleClick, and had been on a sort of 10-year break since then. To date he had funded the company himself out of Santa Barbara, Calif.

The Kleiner investment was led by partner Randy Komisar and is of an undisclosed amount.

That’s the worrisome conclusion you can draw from Dan Roth’s excellent profile of Demand Media in the new issue of Wired. The piece is well-worth reading, but here’s the very short version: Demand has figured out how to generate a massive stream of low-cost stories designed to extract the maximum dollars from Google’s (GOOG) advertisers.

The company has plenty of competitors that do similar stuff–Associated Content, Mahalo, and About.com, owned by the New York Times (NYT)–but Demand’s secret sauce is an algorithm that helps it figure out the most valuable stories to assign, based on search terms and keyword prices. Which leads to stories like “Where can I donate a car in Dallas?”

Demand currently produces about 4,000 new stories a month, paying the freelancers who create them between $15 and $20 a piece. But CEO Richard Rosenblatt wants to up that to a million per year. At that point, Roth notes, “the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.”

Which is why Demand is constantly floated as a potential acquisition candidate for the likes of Yahoo (YHOO), at price tags of $1.5 billion or more. Investors, who bid up Times stock a bit after the company announced plans to cut its newsroom headcount by eight percent, currently value the publisher at $1.3 billion.

All of that make you queasy? Then you’re going to hate reading paragraphs like this:

Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database–the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it–perhaps an impossible proposition–the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.

I think there’s an equally worrisome story–worrisome, that is, from the admittedly self-interested perspective of content creators like me–about the pressure from advertisers, armed with their own technology, to push the value of online content down even further. But we’ll save that for later. One downer a day is plenty.

Want to know what the face of new media looks like? Here’s a 2008 interview Kara Swisher conducted with the preternaturally peppy Rosenblatt: