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Cheap Tickets Cheap Tickets Inc. said today it will start carrying advertising for other businesses on its Web site, which it said has a subscriber base of more than 7 million travelers who have shown they are inclined to make purchases through the Internet.
to put ads on its site
The isle-based online
discount retailer is making
the move to gain extra revenueBy Russ Lynch
Star-BulletinThe Honolulu-based marketer of discount travel said selling advertising that will appear on www.cheaptickets.com is a way of developing a significant new source of revenue.
The key to its success will be a tie-in with New York-based Internet marketing company DoubleClick Inc., which will sell advertising for the Cheap Tickets site.
On Monday, Cheap Tickets announced the first step in that connection, itself buying space on DoubleClick's network of Web sites to create links that will expose millions to the Cheap Tickets Web site.
"It's a significant step for us. It's a big buy," R. Evans Gebhardt, Cheap Tickets vice president for marketing, said in an interview.
Gebhardt declined to say how much his company spent with DoubleClick. However, Cheap Tickets said in January it expects to spend $20 million this year on a range of marketing activities.
Gebhardt, a former Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. marketing director, said Cheap Tickets has been promised 500 million "impressions" a year, meaning its message will be seen that many times, through the DoubleClick connections.
DoubleClick is an international provider of advertising on the Internet and says it provides nearly 5,000 Web advertisers and more than 3,200 publishers with advertising sales, technology, email and other services.
It will distribute the Cheap Tickets advertising through that system.
Gebhardt said. Cheap Tickets' database of 7 million subscribers is "a huge asset that we have yet to leverage," he said.
"One of the ways to do that is to start putting banner ads on our Web site."
Various advertising forms, such as banners, buttons, badges and text links, will start appearing on cheaptickets.com later this month.
Cheap Tickets has three revenue sources -- its toll-free reservations number, its Web site, and its 12 retail offices across the country.
The company's Nasdaq-traded stock, which is down 36 percent so far this year, rose 75 cents to $8.75 today on Wall Street. Cheap Tickets' shares are off nearly 58 percent over the past 52 weeks.