categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
cree lawson
Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 8)
SM: Describe some of your team-building experiences. CL: From the start-ups I was associated with before TAN, I know that team building is perhaps the most difficult aspect of entrepreneurism (aside from spelling the word, of course). You start, and it’s just you and you are alone and you are screaming at the world, saying
Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 7)
SM: How did you finance the different phases of the company? CL: In late 2005 and early 2006 we signed on two publishers that, together, quadrupled the size of our audience. We grew the company to the maximum extent possible with all the profits we’d accumulated. A few months later, one of those publishers left
Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 6)
SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Advertisers? Any other metrics you track? CL: We ran the company at break-even for the first three years. We didn’t have a choice. All the profits went right back into the company (and a few to American Express and Mastercard). Now that we have
Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 5)
SM: What are your top target segments? CL: We’ve been called the “long tail of travel websites” but that’s not completely accurate. RandMcNally.com, LonelyPlanet.com, WAYN.com and AreaGuides.net are hardly long tail publishers. These are premium properties with deeply integrated advertising packages that command high CPMs. Generally speaking, we make most of our revenue comes from
Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 4)
SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? What is your business model? CL: We’ve reviewed a great deal of research on how large the market is for online travel advertising and very specifically banner advertising on travel websites. Forrester says that online travel advertising is an $8-billion-a-year industry in 2007, growing
Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 3)
SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? CL: When we started Travel Ad Network, Google AdSense had just launched its textlink product and everything was about textlinks and performance advertising. No one talked about users; it was all about clicks. And the terms “branding” and “online” weren’t used in the
Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 2)
SM: Where did you get the idea for your current venture? CL: When I wrote a business plan for online advertising on Fodors.com, I knew that Fodor’s had an affluent audience eager to spend thousands of dollars planning the best two weeks of their year. This is an appealing prospect to advertisers. But at Rough
