One of the young media outlets on the Baltimore market is citybizlist, a feisty, information-rich e-newsletter that tracks business deals, investments and the commercial real estate market.
The company was founded in 2007 by Edwin Warfield, former owner of the Daily Record, a business and legal newspaper in Baltimore. citybizlist has expanded now to offer its business newsletters in 11 markets, mostly on the East Coast.
The privately held company, which is based in Fells Point, also disclosed yesterday in a Form D SEC filing that it had raised $200,000 of a total planned $350,000 round of equity financing.
What's interesting to note is that citybizlist disclosed in the Form D that its revenues were between $1 million and $5 million. Not bad for an email newsletter company that seems to be ramping up its business.
I shot Warfield some questions about how his company was doing and how it would use the money and below is his response:
Citybizlist will use the additional funding to expand content, hire editors, recruit account executives, increase the number of cities and develop more technology. In May, citybizlist appointed Richard Rabicoff Executive Editor. http://baltimore.citybizlist.com/yourcitybiznews/detail.aspx?id=83994
In June, we hired two seasoned online business executives - Jennifer Heinlein and Karen Rossbottom. http://baltimore.citybizlist.com/yourcitybiznews/detail.aspx?id=80510
Earlier this year, Google and Yahoo started crawling our content which has resulted in a 352% increase in traffic, year to date. This dramatic increase in web traffic has resulted in an 86% growth in advertising between Q1 and Q2.
New advertisers include: UMUC, Advance Business Systems, Merritt Properties, St. John Properties, Baker Tilley, BGE, WindCurrent.
An example of one of our technology partnerships is Gigya. Gigya has socially optimized citybizlist, making it easier to share content on LinkedIn and Facebook. http://baltimore.citybizlist.com/yourcitybiznews/detail.aspx?id=79881