Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 10)

SM: What are your thoughts about exit? CL: I don’t think Elvis will leave the building for a long time yet. We’ve certainly had offers that would have made me a very wealthy man, or at least a guy with a very loud car stereo.

Microsoft, Masterful Maneuverings

Microsoft has been on the roll, lately. First it froze Facebook, and now it has made an unstoppable bid for Yahoo! while the latter is struggling to regain its stride. To finance this high value Yahoo! deal, Microsoft is expected to borrow money for the first time in its history. And recession worries and subprime

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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

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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

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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

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Google’s Mortalization

Those who make a habit of existing in the clouds eventually have to descend. Perhaps, Google is experiencing a slight doze of “mortalization”. Google investors have lost more than 18% of their money over the past month due to concerns about the crumbling US macroeconomic condition. After yesterday’s 4Q07 results which were highly overestimated by

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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

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Deal Radar 2008: Twitter Gaining Momentum

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that has taken the web by storm. It is a social network that allows users to post “status update” messages either through the web, instant messenger or through a text message from a mobile phone. An update can be a maximum of 140 words. It could be of the nature,

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