Simon Tonner Appointed President as Company Reaches Growth Milestone
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – (January 4, 2012) — DogTime Media, the largest vertical media community focused exclusively on pet enthusiasts, today announced that its audience has grown to an industry leading 46,333,000 unique visitors a month, as reported by comScore Media Metrix1.
Seasoned Internet entrepreneurs Rick Thompson (founder of Playdom, Inc) and Trevor Wright (founder of Vitrue, Inc) launched DogTime Media in September of 2007 with the goal of filling the void left after the first dot-com bubble. Since then the DogTime Media community has grown into the largest audience of pet owners on the Internet, through deep partnerships with over 1,090 pet focused publishers and bloggers, and more than 3,000 shelters and rescues. DogTime Media has been supported by the leading pet and lifestyle brands, and has made donations of more than $250,000 to non-profit animal shelters and rescues.
“We took a unique approach when building our audience,” said Simon Tonner, President of DogTime Media. “We have developed a proven formula of content, community and cause that consistently delivers high value contextual alignment with industry leading scale. That cannot be achieved by vertical models that rely heavily on real time bidding platforms for reach. Where they’re delivering remnant inventory we’re delivering true engagement.”
According to the most recent comScore Media & Plan Metrix reports: visitors return three times more often to DogTime Media than to eHow Pets2; DogTime Media has five times the reach of Say Media Pets and visitors stay 60% longer per page3; five times more pages are viewed on DogTime Media in a month than on WebMD and visitors return twice as often4; and there are ten times more dog owners using DogTime Media than using Petfinder.com5.
“Simon has been a key driver of DogTime Media’s growth over the last four years and he is the right person to lead us into the next phase of our growth,” said Trevor Wright, CEO of DogTime Media. “We have built a first-in-class company that is poised to make the move into ecommerce and take an even larger leadership position in the pet space.”
As Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Tonner was responsible for driving DogTime Media’s sales revenue and audience growth. He developed products that maximized the value of DogTime Media’s Blog Network– the largest in the pet industry, and created the DogTime Pet Blog Awards: aka “The Petties” – the “Oscars of the pet blogging community.” Tonner drove the launch of CatTime.comand established the industry-first Distributed Content Centers, which deliver network-wide distribution of sponsored content.
Tonner is a veteran of digital media with over 18 years of experience with leading media companies including Ziff Davis Publishing, IDG Entertainment, and CMP Media.
Sources:
1) comScore Media Metrix, 11/11 – Total Unique Visitors
2) comScore Media Metrix, 11/11 – Average Visits per Visitor
3) comScore Media Metrix, 11/11 – Total Unique Visitors and Average Minutes Per Page
4) comScore Media Metrix, 11/11 – Total Pages Viewed and Average Usage Days Per Visitor
5) comScore Plan Metrix, 11/11 – Dog – One, two, three or more (pets in HH)
About DogTime Media:
DogTime Mediais the largest vertical media community focused exclusively on pet owners and the 50 billion dollar annual pet market. DogTime Media reaches 46.3 million monthly users via its community of 525 leading pet-focused websites, 565 pet bloggers and more than 3,000 rescue groups, anchored by its own DogTime.comand CatTime.com.
DogTime Media actively supports the efforts of rescue groups and shelters nationwide to significantly reduce the number of homeless and neglected pets in the country by providing authoritative advice to both novice and experienced pet guardians. DogTime Media has donated over $250,000 to pet related causes via its Save a Dogand Save a CatFacebook applications, monthly grants and a variety of other programs. Privately held DogTime Media is based in San Francisco, Calif.
