Making Each Day Special
Internet entrepreneur Evan Britton has built a profitable company, Resource Webs, by acquiring educational and niche sites built by people who were passionate about each subject; Resource Webs then sells the opportunity for targeted advertising. The traffic to two of Britton’s sites caught his interest, and he began wondering how he could benefit from what he was observing.
One site with information about the moon (www.moonphases.info) receives a remarkable 50,000 visitors whenever there is a full moon. He noted that the traffic is great but it’s more difficult to monetize this type of site that pulls people only so often. “Right now the best online products are those that are delivered directly into someone’s inbox,” says Britton.
Another of his sites also does well. Famous Birthdays (www.famousbirthdays.com) receives about 25,000 hits a day when people check it to see what famous people share their birth dates. Britton thought, “What if people had a resource for finding out what else happened on their birthdays?”
With these observations in addition to almost 20 years of experience with Internet companies (he started in the field right after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in the ’90s), Britton started systematically evaluating the resources to which he had access and what he could create that would interest readers: “If 25,000 people a day liked learning who else was born on their birth date, it seemed to me that we could create a value-added product, delivered to their inbox, providing them with other news related to that specific date.”
With that, the concept behind the Famous Daily was born.
