There's a lot of talk about the ease of starting a Web 2.0 company with some spare change. There has been this talk for a while and there will be this talk for a while more.

But, sometimes it takes a lot of money to build a big business. That's what Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt is trying to do. His company has raised a whopping $220 million to acquire 150,000 domain names and fill those web sites with relevant content and features.

During a panel discussion at today's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Rosenblatt said the company is acquring and building web sites focused on enthusiastic verticals such as hiking, home and garden and other topics people are passionate about. He said the sites are "less about photo sharing and more about sharing knowledge."

When asked by panel moderator Tim O'Reilly why the company raised $220 million, Rosenblatt, the former chairman of Intermix, said, "We thought we should go big or don't go at all." His glib responses continued when O'Reilly described Demand Media's recent web site and domain name acquisitions as a roll-up. Rosenblatt said he referred to it as a "roll-on" and noted that the company will provide self publishing tools onto each web site so people can communicate.

Whatever you call it, this is not a pure Web 2.0 play. The first part of its strategy is an old fashioned media rollup. Demand Media is buying media titles in the form of domain names to attract readers. The tools its utilizing to generate content may be classified as new media, but the purchase of hard assets in the form of domain names with millions of dollars in capital is very different from the typical Web 2.0 startup.

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Tags: demand+media, web2, domains, web20summit, web20summit06, vc, venture+capital