Company links media, users

BOULDER – Eric Kallgren, sole owner of Mondo Code LLC, has made a business out of packaging the media. Since 2000 he has been developing ways to make the media and media contacts a user-friendly collection of information.

Mondo Code LLC is the umbrella organization for a number of Internet-based businesses, including Mondo Times, Easy Media List and LettersToEditors.net.

Mondo Times originally was created as a media guide with access to newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, and news agencies worldwide. In addition to providing access to the media, Mondo Times offers a user-run rating system that rates each media according to the quality of content, credibility and political bias.

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Mondo Times covers every daily newspaper in the U.S. and more than 7,500 internationally. More than 15,500 media outlets are included in the Mondo Times media directory, which includes 211 countries.

MondoTimes.com offers three levels of membership. Basic membership is free and provides something similar to business listings in a phone book. Through the directory, users can link to Web sites for different media.

Advanced and professional memberships get e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and direct links to contact pages. Advanced membership runs $49.95 a year and helps people who are in the business of media buying and publicity connect directly to the media outlets with whom they work..

Professional membership costs $199 per year, and includes five uses of EasyMediaList.com – a list generator and download service. Each use generally runs from $7.99 for info on five media outlets to $230 for all the media outlets in California.
“You can download a full media contact list for a particular city or state or by subject,” Kallgren said. “If someone is promoting a new product, downloading a complete media list is really useful.

“When the basic concept for Mondo Times was well-received, I saw a huge opportunity for organizing information so people could do their work easier,” Kallgren said. EasyMediaList.com enables businesses to access media contact information to use with publicity efforts like distribution of press releases and news alerts.

LettersToEditors.net is a paid-for download of contact information on editorial page or opinion page editors.

Mondo Times has 45,000 members, including basic, advanced and professional levels, according to Kallgren. Of that number, 2,500 are paying members.

“We keep our basic membership free to make sure people will rate the media,” he said. “People have a tremendous level of interest in knowing how opaque the media is -and that tends to rely on who they are owned by and what else they do.

“We have a site called MediaOwners.com that looks at the top 100 American companies that own media. It profiles each company and shows a listing of their media holdings.
“TV outlets don’t want people to know who owns them. They want to appear to be local, friendly TV companies, but they’re not. There aren’t many newspapers that are local, friendly companies either.”

Kallgren sees his business as steadily growing. “The choice now is what to do next, whether to put more into marketing our existing services or do more market development,” he said.

Revenue for Mondo Code LLC comes from a combination of membership rates, charges for services like downloading lists and ads on the different sites.

“Our main ads are through Google AdWords – pay-per-click and text ads,” he explained. “Our largest revenue source is from MondoTimes.com. We’re closing in on 1 million users each month.”

Not all users are registered, he added.

“In general today the company overall is valued at about $5 million – 50 percent comes from membership and 50 percent comes from advertising.”

The company has two full-time employees and one part-time. The three staffers handle database maintenance, customer care and product development.

Kallgren hires contract workers for database development.

“I’m scared to begin calculating the investment of my time because it could quickly become an accounting game,” he said. “I don’t have a load of debt sitting on me, but if the business doesn’t prosper I’m taking a lot of risk.

“Any Web-based business can still be a sweat equity business. The real cost comes from time and expertise rather than from equipment and bandwidth.”

Kallgren’s expertise in search engine optimization is proving an asset to getting his business in front of potential customers. “There are lots of different things you can do in setting up a Web site to ensure that a search engine will spider your site and recognize all pages in your site. Being ranked highly for searches is critical.”