It has all the makings of a good old-fashioned Web success story � youth, idealism, a good idea, 24-hour workdays, and, somewhere down the road, the possibility of making lots and lots of money.
Our heroes this time are Sanjay Madan and Tony Hsieh, two computer science grads from Harvard who started a side business developing Web sites while working their first postcollegiate jobs at Oracle. In an effort to help their small-business clients generate traffic, the entrepreneurial pair hit upon the simple but effective idea of a banner-exchange program. That way, they figured, participating sites could get more exposure without having to pay for it.
The idea caught on immediately � within a couple of days, dozens of sites had joined the network. Within a week, Madan and Hsieh decided to put everything else aside to concentrate solely on their new project.
A little more than a year later, their company, LinkExchange, has become the Web's largest ad network, with about 100,000 member sites and 800 new sites added each day.
According to a March audit conducted by Web statistics firm I/PRO, those 100,000 sites deliver about 4 million ad views per day. The daily impressions are sliced up three ways: half are devoted to promoting member sites, a quarter go toward promoting LinkExchange itself, and the remaining quarter are earmarked for sale to paying customers.
With 25 workers jammed into a San Francisco warehouse, LinkExchange's headquarters has the ragtag look of either a low-budget volunteer operation or The Next Big Thing. In a way, the company is both. "From the start, our goal has been to make our members happy," Hsieh says. "Our company has grown by providing the services our members have asked for."
Venture capitalists are beginning to knock on LinkExchange's door, but its founders insist they're more concerned with customer service than selling out. "We want to bring banner advertising to everyone on the Web, not just the big corporations," says Madan. "Everything we do is guided by that goal."
This article originally appeared in the October issue of Wired magazine.
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