CHICO START-UP COMPANY IS GETTING NATIONAL ATTENTION

Sacramento Bee, November 19, 2001

A Chico start-up company is getting some national attention with its pledge to help newspapers turn their Web sites from "sinkholes to profit centers."

AdExpedia, which puts both display ads and advertising inserts on newspaper Web sites, already has signed up one major customer, the San Francisco Chronicle . And it expects to announce deals with two other major papers in the next few days.

It has much bigger goals for 2002, with plans to sign up 30 papers and generate $10 million in sales.

"We're talking with all of the top 10 newspaper companies, and they all say we have a compelling product and that they are interested," says AdExpedia's CEO, John Strishower. Among the interested parties is The Bee.

Using a software product it calls AdTabs, AdExpedia charges a fee to take all of a newspaper's display ads and post them on the paper's Web site. It does the same with newspaper inserts -- and all are posted in an easily searchable format.

Visitors to the site can search by company or product, get directions to advertisers' stores and links to their Web sites. They also can sign up to receive e-mail alerts when products they want are available.

The latter feature is one of the things exciting some news executives because it allows them to monitor consumer demand and sell ads accordingly,

"For 150 years we've placed ads based on what advertisers wanted to sell," says Robert Cauthorn , the Chronicle's vice president for digital media. "Now we can solicit ads based on what people want to buy."

AdExpedia has 40 employees and about $600,000 left from a $2 million financing round last year. Strishower expects to close a Series B round, raising between $2.5 million and $3.5 million, in the next 30 to 90 days.

-- Bob Shallit

< Back to Articles About Travidia