Woman with a boa and a bad laugh sells website for $23m US

by Actual News Geezer | July 18, 2007 at 11:12 am

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The "woman with a boa and a dream and a bad laugh " has just sold her company for $23 million and is now laughing all the way to the bank.

Craig Newmark just posted a squib on his blog that his friend Laurel Touby has sold her popular media jobs website to JupiterMedia, an Internet research company.

MediaBistro actually started out as a kind of cocktail salon for Boston and NYC webheads.

“This company is a true Internet success story,” Ms. Touby said. “This started as an offline community, a cocktail party, that turned into this Web site that actually makes money.”

Employers pay to post jobs on the site, which also offers premium content to users who pay subscription fees. Last year, the site had 600,000 unique visitors, and many signed up for offerings like seminars and courses in freelance writing.

“Mediabistro provides our Jupiter- Online Media division with another diversified and fast-growing revenue stream through its vertical online job board,” said Alan M. Meckler, chairman and chief executive of Jupitermedia.

Who is Laurel Touby?

Laurel Touby, a journalist for 10 years prior to her entrepreneurial career, founded mediabistro.com in 1993 as a gathering place for professionals in journalism, publishing and other media-related industries in New York City. She currently serves as chief executive officer. As a Web-based business, the company now attracts such professionals from across the country and sponsors parties, classes and seminars in major U.S-based cities and abroad. Monthly traffic to the Web site has soared to more than 5.4 million page views and 600,000 unique visitors. Touby had started her journalism at Working Woman magazine, moved to Business Week as a staff editor, and in 1993 began writing a column on workplace issues for Glamour. As a freelance journalist, she has covered everything from travel to business to breast cancer for a variety of publications, among them New York, Travel & Leisure, Self, and Working Mother. She is a graduate of Smith College with a degree in economics.

This too from Gawker:

A woman with a boa and a dream and a bad laugh has emerged from the hubbub of the internet triumphant. "The kids at Gawker are going to go crazy tomorrow," predicted LA Observed last night. Well, yes. We are. Like, we might have to be put in protective custody. For Mediabistro, everyone's favorite amalgamation of freelancer message boards and half-hearted blogs, which gets 50,000 unique visitors a month, has been acquired for $23 million by Jupitermedia. (That's $38 for each person who came to their website last year!) We don't know what to say except: Wow. Holy hell, wow. There's something really wrong with the economy. I guess we have to say congratulations to Laurel. It seems like if we had any brains at all we would have done that ourselves.