Friday, October 12, 2007

Washington Post purchases Course Advisor student lead generation firm.

The Washington Post Co. has acquired CourseAdvisor Inc. for an undisclosed price.

The D.C. media company leveraged a small investment it made last year in the search engine marketing company based in Wakefield, Mass. CourseAdvisor, founded in 2004, matches students skills with college and university programs nationwide.

The move comes as The Washington Post Co. tries to regain advertising, readership and circulation at its publications.

The company also has seen positive results from its education business, Kaplan Inc., which helps people prepare for college and graduate school entrance exams.

In August, The Washington Post Co. (NYSE:WPO) reported its second-quarter earnings dropped to $68.8 million in the quarter ended July 1 from $78.7 million a year ago.

However, total revenue moved up to $1 billion from $969 million.

The education segment grew 23 percent to $503 million in the second quarter, up from $409 million a year ago.

The Washington Post Co. not only owns its flagship newspaper, but also publications including Slate, El Tiempo Latino, The Gazette and Southern Maryland Newspapers, Newsweek magazine and Cable ONE.

CourseAdvisor will act as an independent subsidiary of The Washington Post Co.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is great news. Hopefully, it will be managed a lot better and can experience growth. It's important that companies learn to focus on education leads, considering that there are already plenty of students that are enrolled in wrong courses or even wrong schools. Proper lead performance therefore is needed, and Washington Post may just do the job.