A new year and time to visit your astrologer

Astrocenter floods web in banner ad splurge

Copyright © 2001 Media Life Magazine - Original article in Jan. 15, 2001 edition.

By Jeremy Schlosberg

Out of nowhere an ad for an astrology web site became the web’s most-viewed ad last week.

Offering a free astrological forecast for 2001, a banner for a site called Astrocenter.com delivered an astronomical 84.9 million impressions before an audience of 11.2 million unique visitors for the week ending Jan. 14, according to new data from Nielsen/NetRatings.

Typically the web’s most-viewed banner of the week may deliver 20 to 30 million impressions.

The Astrocenter ad ran on Yahoo and reached approximately 17 percent of the entire active internet population for the week.

The ad was very consciously placed in early January, according to Jeremiah Rosen, the company’s U.S. head of business development.

“New Year’s is a big time of year for astrology because people want their forecasts for the year,” he says.

The site claims some 2.5 million unique visitors in the past month. Astrocenter.com has been running ads on Yahoo just about since the site’s debut in October 1999.

The Astrocenter audience is 75 percent female; the average visitor to the site is 34 years old and earns $35,000 a year.

Astrocenter.com employs a dozen professional astrologers who each day assemble about 140 different readings based on zodiac signs and sun and moon positions.

Some 5 million people have passed through the site for their horoscopes, according to company data. And 1.2 million receive daily email horoscopes that can be sponsored by advertisers to reach specifically targeted groups of users. The company claims email advertisers can achieve response rates in the 10 to 15 percent range.

The site earns 80 percent of its revenue from advertising, the rest from content licensing and unbranded astrology content. Astrocenter provides horoscopes for Yahoo and has its own branded astrology channel on Juno.

Astrocenter.com is a small but international company with eight employees in the U.S. and 12 in Paris.

The company targets some of its banner placements within Yahoo, focusing on Yahoo’s games and chat areas as well as its instant messenger function, all three of which appear to get a high response, says Rosen. This is because users have learned that they can click on a banner while gaming or chatting and not lose their place, he adds.

Astrocenter was founded by a French engineer named Eric Bonjour, who noticed that two of the top 20 search terms on French search engines were related to astrology.

Astrocenter will soon be rolling out astrology sites in the U.K. and Germany and also has plans for a new American site that will launch this spring. The new site will branch out from astrology, the details of which remain under wraps.

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