MeetInnovators™

Drew Curtis, the owner of Fark.com, generates 1.5M -- 2M page views per day out of his house, all via public relations. I asked Drew a lot about how he monetizes Fark, and he gave some pretty interesting answers.

This interview is with Frank Addante from The Rubicon Project. Frank has started multiple successful companies; one was funded by Sequoia. Some key points of the interview: Find out about the most exciting vision for online advertising I have seen this year. Discover how the Rubicon Project aims to remove most of the friction from online advertising. Learn how publishers will be able to automatically earn the highest ECPM without having to manually test thousands of CPA offers.

This interview is with Scott Rewick who was one of the Netblue (now Connexus) founders. Some key points of the interview: Hear from one of the Netblue (now Connexus) founders about how the company was started. Learn what impact taking venture capital can have on your company. Discover how Scott invests in companies -- and how you can too!

This interview is with Brian Kurtz from Boardroom. Brian has been around direct response marketing longer than most people, and his company has been highly successful at it. Some key points of the interview: Hear from one of the leaders of a $100M offline direct marketing company. Learn how Boardroom uses its newsletter to create highly profitable backend products. Discover how Boardroom tests and optimizes its copy to improve performance.

Larry Organ of ConsumerBase is incredibly interesting to talk with because he understands better than just about anyone else how data can be used effectively. It's a tricky area with lots of privacy and legal implications, but is extremely powerful and is becoming the basis for many types of targeting online, including behavioural targeting. Some key points of the interview: Learn from an expert in offline/online data sales. Find out how this company uses direct response marketing to work with blue chip customers. Discover how cell phone advertising can be legally done.

This interview is with Khalid Shaikh of FlyUpload. This guy founded YouSendIt, a file transfer service. Aside from a very good viral model, one reason why they became famous early on is because Iraqi militants used their service to send out videos of kidnapped contractors. The YouSendIt concept has spawned many new business models on the Internet, including YouTube. Some key points of the interview: Learn about a virtually unknown business model that has twice the traffic of Facebook (considered to be a $2 billion dollar company). Find out how these sites are achieving 30% monthly growth. Hear the inside story of the economics of this business model.

This interview is with Jeff & Ryan Gardner from AdCafe. These guys are some of the top advertising brokers in Utah. They're also identical twins! Some key points of the interview: Hear from some of the top advertising brokers in the industry. Learn how they get traffic that generates 20,000+ sales per month. Find out how you can drive more traffic to your site. Please note: Since this interview was published, the company name has been changed to Bigpayout.com.

This interview, which is a great one, is with Joe Sugarman, the man behind BluBlocker sunglasses, one of the top infomercials during the 1980's. TV media is bought just the same as Internet media, so this is extremely relevant to today. Hear how BluBlockers got started. Find out how Joe regularly made 300,000 sales/month and 250,000 sales in one day! Get some advice on moving a successful Internet offer to TV.