Austin Company launches European reptile and amphibian portal

AUSTIN, Tx. -- OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc., a privately held corporation, announced today that it has launched a european reptile and amphibian portal, kingsnake.com europe (http://kingsnake.co.uk) as a companion to its existing reptile and amphibian web community, kingsnake.com (http://www.kingsnake.com). The successful kingsnake.com site, the internets largest community of reptile and amphibian hobbyists, contains over a hundred message boards, classified ads, streaming audio web casts, and hosts over 400 business web sites in the rapidly growing reptile and amphibian pet industry.

"While internet use in Europe is still far less common than in North America, net access costs are dropping fast and we anticipate that Europe will soon catch up." Said Jeff Barringer, President of OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc.
"Our european traffic has already been running at 15-20% each month so we already have significant traction in the marketplace"
The new site will have features such as message boards, classified ads, feature articles, chat, and other features in the french, german, dutch, spanish, swedish, enlish, and italian languages intitally, with plans to add portugese, polish, russian, and finnish languages soon.
In true guerilla start-up fashion, OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc., owners of the kingsnake.com web site, still operate the business from living rooms and garages. "This started as a hobby in 1994 and evolved into a business. Since then our growth has been enormous. We now see over 40,000 visitors a day"
kingsnake.com was ranked in the top 6000 most popular web sites by Alexa Internet (http://www.alexa.com), a free and independent Web navigation service which tracks website activity around the globe and collates information from Internet users.
In February the independent web analysis firm PCData Online (http://www.pcdata.com) ranked kingsnake.com at 8,020 in popularity (based on unique visits over a six month period) among the literally millions of web sites on the internet. PCData Online tracks Internet traffic to web sites and conducts custom polls and studies through its sample population of home Internet users.
Both rankings place the kingsnake.com site within the top 1% most popular web sites on the internet.
Like many other dot com's OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc., has struggled against enormous odds.Un-like many other dot com's they built the business without outside investment. "In 1999 we shopped our business plan around to a variety of venture capital firms and angel investors but we were unable to secure any capital. They either didn't understand our business, it didn't fit their model, we needed too much money, we didn't need enough money, it was always something. Meanwhile we built, and will continue to build, our business the old fashioned way, based on revenues.
While this has throttled our ability to add features and services and expand into other marketplaces, it has not slowed our traffic growth. We continue to add new vendors and users on a daily basis. While other Austin based dot com's are struggling to survive, we have been running this without the benefits or the problems associated with venture capital or angels.
One of kingsnake.com's vendors, commercial live insect vendor New York Worms has seen its fortunes grow along with the kingsnake.com web site.
"We were early vendors and believers in the kingsnake.com site and we have literally built our online business around its user base" said Carlton Smith, one of the owners of New York Worms.
Amazon Reptile Center owner Scott Solar agrees. "When we opened our retail pet center in Montclair, California last year and wanted to launch our web site we knew that by hosting it at kingsnake.com we would immediately see traffic.
When we launched the site we sold so much product we almost didn't have enough left for the retail facility"
In March 2000 OnlineHobbyist.com, expanded its web community presence by launching a new series of pet communities under the name of PetHobbyist (http://www.pethobbyist.com) with each segment of the pet hobby receiving its own community.
OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc. (http://www.onlinehobbyist.com) is a privately held company formed in 1999, based on the success of the former kingsnake.com publications, to build web based communities of hobbyists. Headquarters are in Austin, Texas, USA.
OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc. web communities include:
http://www.PetHobbyist.com http://www.kingsnake.com http://kingsnake.co.uk http://www.BirdHobbyist.com http://www.AquariumHobbyist.com http://www.InsectHobbyist.com http://www.CritterHobbyist.com http://www.DogHobbyist.com http://www.CatHobbyist.com http://www.ExoticHobbyist.com http://www.HorseHobbyist.com http://www.KitHobbyist.com
CONTACT: Jeff Barringer, President and CEO, OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc. Tel: +1 512 990 1092 e-mail: jeffb@kingsnake.com WWW: http://www.onlinehobbyist.com Carlton Smith, President CEO, New York Worms. Tel: +1 516 759 3538 e-mail: info@nyworms.com WWW: http://www.nyworms.com Scott Solar, President, Amazon Reptile Center. Tel: +1 909 447 5103 e-mail: scott@amazonreptile.com WWW: http://www.amazonreptile.com