One of the great benefits of our recent acquisition of Mediabistro is that Jupitermedia has added another line of business. This is the business of offering courses and training both in person and more importantly online.

During its 10 year history Mediabistro has been developing courses and training on a variety of media related topics. Initially these courses were limited to the classroom in New York City and in a few other cities around the United States. However a few years ago Mediabistro started to offer online courses. The majority of courses are now online and this percentage is growing significantly.

And now we are going to take the platform that Mediabistro has developed for online courses and training and start making offerings in Web development, IT, and image editing. Obviously we have large communities of readers in our other divisions who should be interested in this concept. Fortunately we can start these new offerings from the base and platform that Mediabistro has developed over 10 years.

It is interesting for me to make such a statement because our fundamental interest in purchasing Mediabistro was its vertical online job board. Now that we have owned Mediabistro for nearly three months we see more opportunities for growth - namely online courses and training.

One final dimension: Mediabistro is now using video to capture many of the training offerings. This means that we will have yet another business opportunity to sell archived courses over and over again long after the actual course was presented. Thus we have a way to leverage content into another revenue stream.

This is just another example of the evolution of Jupitermedia into a multi-faceted company with a variety of frictionless ecommerce offerings.