Company

Godengo provides city & regional and lifestyle magazines with a strong online presence and networked advertising inventory, enabling them to effectively compete online.

Godengo’s Rivista™ software is designed from the ground up for multiplying traffic volume, search engine optimization and increasing profits at magazine publisher’s web sites. Typically, after six months, publications using Rivista™ double or triple their web traffic.

At the same time, the Godengo™ Online Ad Network harnesses an affluent, upscale consumer audience representing the premier city & regional and lifestyle publications, providing national reach with deep expertise in local markets.

“When it comes to Web advertising, smaller niche publishers face a quandary. Their sites attract committed audiences with the kind of high-quality demographics advertisers want. Yet, their relatively tiny page view counts have largely made them non-entities when it comes to real world advertising revenue.” — Online Media Marketing & Advertising 2006

The Godengo Story

Godengo president and CEO Tim Sullivan had been working at web host and network service provider NTT Verio for eight years as director of web marketing. In June 2004, he left the company with five other NTT Verio executives to start Godengo.

The team noticed that whenever a client left NTT Verio, it was because after they spent money developing their site, they didn’t see the return on investment. “We wanted to develop a software platform that integrated search engine optimization, online advertising and e-commerce, so the website would be a real business when it went live,” explains Sullivan.

As luck would have it, a regional publication called Palm Springs Life consulted the group on a new web strategy. While assessing the business, they realized that this type of publication had the building blocks of a profitable web presence inherent to their business: lots of readers, unique original content, and quality advertisers.

Godengo’s founders saw the vast majority of city & regional and lifestyle publications had been unable to capitalize on the online opportunity by leveraging these assets to claim their share of the burgeoning online advertising and services revenue.

Godengo built its new software platform for these publications, a turnkey, web-based solution, comprised of easy-to-use software applications and fully-managed online advertising services.

The Name

Godengo = Derived from the name of the character Goto Dengo in Neil Stephenson’s novel “Cryptonomicon” that the founders of the company all read. Toward the end of the story during a poignant conversation, Dengo describes the economic rise of Japan after WWII. It was not based on wealth (Japan’s gold had been hidden and lost in the Philippines), but the knowledge and determination of the Japanese people, their most valuable natural resource. Godengo felt this very much reflected the culture they wanted to create at their new venture.