Q&A Best of Upsize
Goodbye bootstraps
DAVE AND ANDY DAHL STRIVE TO ATTRACT INVESTORS TO MyTiWi
Upsize: Describe your company as it stands today.
Andy Dahl: Four years ago Dad (Dave Dahl) and I started Totally Interactive Weather Information, or TiWi. Dad had been doing the weather with Hubbard Broadcasting, at the time for 30 years, now for 34 years. He said, Andy, a lot of people are turning to the Internet for weather. Let's cre- ate a product that's interesting, informative, and maybe more importantly is a revenue generator, mostly for ourselves.
We created Mytiwi.com. Shortly after that we started fielding calls from stations, saying, can we take that technology and place it on our website? The light bulb went on and we thought, we could package this technology and lease it to media sites. That started a new revenue stream, to sell a monthly subscription and the media sites would be paying for the use of those tools. They were responsible for the sale of the ad space. Right about May this past year, we had about 300 media properties as customers. We realized that we can manage, deliver, do everything that we can do in those ad spaces, across all those media properties, from one central location. So we became the ad manager for all that space.
Upsize: It sounds like you've made a big change from your original business plan.
Dahl: We have, we have! We have matured in business. We started in 2007 and it was a tough time at media outlets and it only got tougher.
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Sales staffs were being cut at the media outlets, as well as the creative designers at those sites. They were really eliminating their ability to sell the ad space. We thought, we can do this, and if we have access to all those advertisers, I can plug those in and manage it all day long. We can provide the weather tools free of charge, so the media outlets can have that content. In two-thirds of the cases now, that's the case, that they get the content for free. The original clients, those guys that are paying subscriptions, we are not plugging national ads into their space. That's about a third of our business now.
UPSIZE ONLINE THE GROWTH GUIDE 2012
Andy, left, and Dahl Dahl, MyTiWi
Upsize: Will that subscription piece become less and less of your revenue, as you sell more and more of the online ads?
Dahl: Actually, as of late last year and all of this year, the subscription model is becoming more popular again, because advertisers, especially smaller local advertisers, have money to spend again. It's less effort, less energy for the media
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN HANKIN
