Nielsen shares soar on NYSE debut

Nielsen CEO, David Calhoun, (2nd R) and company officials ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in celebration of their IPO, January 26, 2011.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - TV ratings company Nielsen and online media company Demand Media made successful debuts on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.

Shares of Nielsen Holdings, the consumer measurement firm known for its dominance in television ratings, were at $25.53, 11 percent above their $23 initial public offering price in afternoon trading.

Shares of Demand Media Inc were trading at $22.98, or 35.2 percent above their $17 IPO price.

Nielsen raised $1.6 billion, nearly a tenth more than expected. Demand Media, an online company that relies on an army of freelance writers to churn out articles and video designed to appear at the top of Web searches, raised $151.3 million, more than a third above its target.

Nielsen was taken private in 2006 in a deal worth just over $10 billion.

Nielsen sold 71.4 million shares, representing about 20 percent of the company. At the stock's midday price Wednesday that valued the company at just over $9 billion.

The Demand Media offering, while much smaller, was seen as an icebreaker for more and larger Internet-related deals this year, like group discount site Groupon, business network LinkedIn and social games company Zynga.

(Reporting by Clare Baldwin and Jennifer Saba, editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Derek Caney and Matthew Lewis)