Mr. Brisco: We are a leading owner and operator of vertical Web sites. We operate more than 100 Web sites that are leaders in specific vertical consumer niches. These verticals include travel and leisure, health, automotive, careers, home, money and shopping. In total, we're now attracting about 50 million unique visitors per month, and our Web sites are typically the leader in the niches in which they operate. As examples, we own DoItYourself.com, which is the largest home repair Web site, and ApartmentRatings.com, which is the largest user information site for apartment buildings.
TWST: Which of those verticals have performed best in this economy? Which are lagging because of the recession? Will you pursue any shifts in your strategy in response to those trends?
Mr. Brisco: On average, in terms of our organic growth on our advertising business in 2009, we'll close the year at about 10% growth for the full year, which stands in stark contrast to the overall online advertising market, which contracted during the prior year. So I'd start with that. Our Web sites are performing well in spite of the soft economy. Inside of that, we've had some verticals grow faster than others, and it generally follows where the credit crisis impacted or didn't impact certain markets. For example, products that require financing, like automotive or personal computers, had a much more difficult time in 2009. On the other hand, there were a lot of counter-cyclical market segments for us in 2009, areas such as home repair, used cars, job sourcing and discount shopping. All of those moved strongly positive and kind of countered a broad economic trend in 2009.
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