Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What I see here, which is interesting actually, talks to a similar trend. It’s a significant opportunity out there. There are tons of people in tons of different verticals who have built followings. Maybe, they could be traffic followings. It could be a blog that has a readership. It could be various kinds

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The students are making $8,000 to $10,000 a year and you have about 100 of these kinds of sites that you’re working with? Jeff Cohen: I can’t give specific numbers but we have sites that do $100,000 a year in sales and we have sites that do multiple millions a year. They can

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 3)

Jeff Cohen: Let’s say you are at the University of Denver and you wanted to open up a local online textbook price comparison and market it on campus to all the people you know—that was easy to do. But it was difficult to take that concept at an individual campus level and scale it across

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your target audience is all college students and the price comparison of textbooks is your sweet spot. Jeff Cohen: That is definitely our sweet spot. The technology, theoretically, can be used in the comparison of any book. It’s not specifically tied to a textbook. The actual comparison of the prices could happen for

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 1)

There are hundreds of thousands of people in various niches who have built followings online. Now comes the question: how can they monetize this following? Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself as well as CampusBooks. Jeff Cohen: I currently live in Chicago, Illinois. I was born and raised in St. Louis. I went to the

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Online Tutoring Still In Its Infancy: Sylvan Learning CEO Jeff Cohen (Part 7)

SM: What is your estimate of the 2010 tutoring market? JC: In dollar terms, the numbers that I have seen suggest that the market is around $4 billion. There are 53 million students in public education in the United States. The real question, which I don’t think anyone can answer, is exactly how many of them need

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Online Tutoring Still In Its Infancy: Sylvan Learning CEO Jeff Cohen (Part 6)

SM: How many students have you worked with online? JC: Thousands. What is really important is that we have created an online experience built on best practices we learned from our in-person tutoring sessions.

Online Tutoring Still In Its Infancy: Sylvan Learning CEO Jeff Cohen (Part 5)

SM: If we were viewing the screen of an online tutoring session, what would we be seeing? Is there a whiteboard? JC: It feels like a whiteboard. It is a shared environment where both teacher and student can see the lesson plan. The teacher can make comments on the screen and write on the screen,

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