Space cadets take a journey to the final frontier

Nearly a decade ago, Lou Dobbs abandoned the anchor's desk at CNN, the cable news network, to take a journey into the final frontier, launching a fledgling website devoted to all things space.

In spite of bold predictions of success, Space.com burned through tens of millions of dollars in cash and fell to earth a few years later.

While it is well known that Dobbs subsequently returned to his old perch at CNN, where he now rails against job outsourcing and illegal immigration, it may come as a surprise to some that Space.com lives on.

In fact, it is expanding.

After overhauling its management and strategy in the wake of the dotcom crash, the renamed Imaginova is now profitable and expects to generate about $35 million in revenue this year.

"It's still on the right track, it's just taken us longer than we thought to get to where we want to be," said Jack Williams, president of Gannett Digital Ventures, an early - and patient - investor in the site.

If nothing else, Imaginova has succeeded at defying the popular narratives of a turn-of-the-century internet start-up, which tended to end in either massive success or crushing failure.

Instead, with the support of committed investors, it has managed to muddle through the ups and downs of the market and is now hoping to break out.

Williams credited Dobbs' entrepreneurialism and notoriety for getting the project off the ground. Yet he pointed to the recruitment in 2002 of Dan Stone, a former internet consultant, as a turning point for the company.

It was Stone, soon after taking over as chief executive, who decided that Space.com needed to alter its course. "One of my first conclusions was that the space market was not going to be big enough to sustain us," he recalled.

So Stone set about expanding the company's mission from serving space enthusiasts to the much wider audience of people interested in general science and innovation.

After raising $5 million in new funding to keep the lights on, Imaginova launched LiveScience.com in late 2004.

Its speciality is taking articles from scientific journals and reducing them to the sort of short, easy-to-read pieces that are suitable for the web - what Stone calls "water-cooler science".

One example was a study revealing that the things that tend to annoy a person about their spouse only tend to grow more irritating as time passes.

Whether or not it qualified as hard science, the story quickly zoomed to the top of Yahoo Buzz, which ranks stories based on their popularity with users.

Imaginova has since raised an additional $20 million and expanded its stable of websites to include Aviation.com, which is devoted to flying, while also acquiring Orion Telescopes, which sells telescopes over the internet, to complement StarryNight.com, a maker of astronomy software that it already owned.

"The whole goal here is to build a thriving community of intellectually curious people," Stone said.

Its most recent deal was the acquisition in October of Newsarama.com, a site devoted to comic book fanatics.

While it might at first glance seem unrelated to Imaginova's other properties, Newsarama's readers, when they are not catching up on the latest exploits of Superman and The Hulk, tend to be interested in science fiction.

The hope is that the site will also allow Imaginova to garner more advertising from film studios to supplement technology patrons such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

In order to be successful, the company will have to continue to expand its audience - both on its own site and through those of partners, according to Mr Williams. At present, Imaginova now draws more than three million visitors to its sites each month, according to ComScore, the media ratings firm.

Imaginova, like other internet companies, claims that ComScore underestimates its traffic and that the actual number exceeds seven million.

Whatever the case, Stone is convinced that science is poised to become cool - or at least less geeky - in an era in which computer tycoons such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have become popular heroes and global warming is a mainstream topic of discussion.

He points to a study that the company commissioned from OMD, the media agency, that found that as many as 60 million US adults were "intellectually curious" about science and innovation.

While many were hard-core scientists, others were enthusiasts who might work in finance or journalism during the day but peer through a telescope at night.

In other words, people not unlike Dobbs.

While the celebrity anchor might make a good pitch man for Imaginova and still owns a small stake in the company, that doesnot seem likely. "As you know," said Stone, "his interests have evolved."

- Financial Times