In the News

Reproduced with permission from The Oakland Tribune

Online Startup Foresees Profits Serving Users

By Monique Beeler

September 27, 2000 - Paul J.J. Payack is the president and chief executive officer of Danville-based yourDictionary.com. Of the approximately 2 million visitors to the dictionary and reference site last month, 30 percent came from outside the United States.

NOT SURE WHAT a "morphologist" is? Need the correct spelling of "phonetician?"

The folks at yourDictionary.com hope you'll search for the answers at their Web site crammed with word games, grammar tools and 1,528 dictionaries in 230 languages.

With a partnership deal with Merriam-Webster and others in the works with a major computer maker and an encyclopedia company, yourDictionary.com anticipates becoming profitable within six to nine months, President and Chief Executive Officer Paul J.J. Payack said. "Everybody you think of as our competitors are actually our partner," said Payack, seated at a conference table strewn with dictionaries and paperwork in his Danville office. "They need us."

Sales in the world of print dictionaries have been flat for years, so the possibility of making money online has drawn interest from traditional powerhouses, such as Merriam-Webster.

Merriam-Webster runs its own site, www.WordCentral.com, but the company's Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus also appear on yourDictionary.com as preferred reference materials. Additionally, yourDictionary.com offers quick definition "lookup" functions that draw from these sources.

Backed by angel investor and entrepreneur George Wilson, who poured "several million" - Payack won't say how much - into the seven-employee startup, yourDictionary.com has enough in the bank to keep the company afloat for a few years. Wilson is the former head of Dublin-based Intelliguard Software, where Payack once worked in marketing and communications.

The experience also inspired Payack's boss.

As Payack skimmed the Latin dictionary, Wilson peered over his shoulder and commented that someone could make a fortune off the Web site's content. Soon after, Wilson and Payack approached Beard about creating yourDictionary.com.

Beard agreed to sell his site to the new venture and came on board as chief linguistics officer and chief technology officer. The three men hold roughly equal shares of the privately held company, Payack said.

Beard's standing in academic circles also helped him assemble a 27-member advisory council, who offer expertise in subjects from Australian Aboriginal tongues to Turkish grammar. The site also distinguishes itself from less academic competitors, such as Microsoft's Encarta, by offering the Endangered Language Repository.

Half of the world's 7,327 languages and dialects will disappear by the end of the century, Payack said.

By offering a spot to collect the content of the last known Nubian-to-English dictionary or a historical grammar of the Lithuanian, Etruscan and Thracian languages, yourDictionary.com hopes to preserve some of them.

"The words define the world you live in," Payack said. "When you preserve a language, you preserve a culture."

Dictionary: Site preserves languages
But first Payack and his partners must preserve yourDictionary.com.

The company is relying on a growing audience to boost the company's page view and advertising revenues. When visitors turn to yourDictionary.com to check out the word of the day or to look up the Algonquin term for "bear," they'll also encounter pop-up ads and banners.

Each time a visitor looks at a Web page it counts as one "page view." The more page views a site boasts, the more they can charge advertisers.

"How it works out in the Web world, 1 million page views is significant," Payack explained. "Ten million is the big league."

YourDictionary.com has tallied an average of about 700,000 page views per month, but Payack says the site's numbers are escalating rapidly. From June to July alone, he said, the page view tripled. In August, the site registered 2.1 million page views.

He also plans to avoid the pitfalls other dot.coms succumbed to, such as growing too big, too fast.

"If it's Web-based, you don't have to have 500 people working," Payack said. "We'll expand, (but) I'm not going to grow to 100 employees. We'll grow organically."

©2001 The Oakland Tribune