DotCom Tales: Vantagenet and Freepolls.com
My first successful venture was co-founding Vantagenet in 1997. I had JAWSmovie.com up and running and I wanted to add a forum to the site. My business partner and I wrote some forum software and decided to offer it to any webmaster that wanted it for free. We hosted the forums on our servers, and were supported by small banner ads on our pages. Vantagenet exploded after I had the idea to start offering free web polls in 1998, as Freepolls.com. We were listed in the Media Metrix top 500 sites (in terms of unique visitors) and had over 100,000 user accounts when we attracted the attention of About.com (then called The Mining Company) in the spring of 1999. We had huge traffic, but since we were a small company (two people) without any sales staff, we were not getting the best CPM rates for our traffic. About.com had 600+ niche websites and wanted to add our tools to those sites, and monetize our traffic at the much higher CPM rates they were getting at the time. Their first offer to acquire us was a typical lowball offer so we flat out rejected it.
They were shocked — they expected a counter offer. We were making great money and had no overhead and loved what we were doing. About.com persisted so we hired a law firm and professional negotiator to help broker the deal. As the first acquisition of About.com, we ended up getting a nice cash and stock deal with some great stock options (at the time). The stock later became nearly worthless after About.com was acquired by Primedia right before the internet bubble burst. The options did become completely worthless because the stock price dropped below the strike price and never recovered.
The Freepolls.com Boat in 1999, with co-founders and two employees
Our time with About.com was a blast. We opened a small satellite office in St. Paul, MN (About.com was based in Manhattan), hired some programmers, and bought a boat and slapped the Freepolls.com logo on it. About.com was flush with capital after their successful IPO in July 1999. They moved to a lavish new office in NYC and blew wads of cash on weekly parties. We traveled to New York quite often and I gained valuable experience in how to manage a business. We partnered with large sites such as the Wall Street Journal and JC Penny and expanded Vantagenet’s offerings to include many different web tools, such as guestbooks, surveys, ratings tools and more. We started another hugely successful site for About, called RankPeople.com, that allowed users to rate pictures on a scale of one to ten.
Vantagenet co-founders in Manhattan circa 2000. I am on the right.
All in all, before the internet crash, the deal for Vantagenet really paid off for About.com. They were able to monetize our traffic at a rate 20 times higher than what we were getting, and our traffic helped them move up in rankings of the top web properties. Before the Primedia acquisition, the rumor was that Yahoo! was going acquire About, but it unfortunately never happened. Instead, all of our BOUT stock converted to Primedia stock and the price dropped like a rock. About.com gave us a nice severance package when they decided to shut down our St. Paul office in October 2001. Freepolls.com remained after we left, but it was moved over to About’s Utah-based company Freeservers, which they later sold to United Online.
Freepolls.com is still up and running and the traffic is decent, but they haven’t changed it in years. Freeservers let RankPeople.com die long ago.
It’s really too bad how it all ended. I still wish we had Freepolls.com, as our main competitor from the time, Bravenet, is still going strong. Instead of selling their entire company, the guys from Bravenet just decided to sell a stake in their company, got some VC money and retained ownership. Why didn’t we think of that?
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