Geology.com

Hobart King is a geologist by trade with a curiosity for all things digital. "I have a PhD in geology," he shares, "and worked as a practicing geologist for 15 years and taught as a professor for 20 years - I actually taught the second online class ever in Pennsylvania.".

Hobart started experimenting with websites in the mid 1990s, and when in 2005 he found out the domain Geology.com was up for auction, he knew he needed to buy it. "I went home and told my wife I wanted to buy the website," he recalls, "so we scraped together as much money as we could and actually won it in the auction. I was thrilled."

Today Geology.com is a family business, with Hobart's wife, sister, nephew and daughter each working in various roles. His daughter and sister have been part of the company for almost 20 years, which makes the business incredibly meaningful. "When it’s your family that you’re employing," he says, "everyone has a lot more of a stake, because our wellbeing really relies on it."

To keep his family business growing and thriving, Hobart takes a data-driven approach. "From the start, I looked at the content on our site with a profitability model," he explains, "I looked at all of our inputs -- how much time I spent writing, costs of image licensing fees and props for photography, employee time to publish articles -- and found that on average our articles take around five years to recover our investment, and that some articles are more profitable than others. So it’s given me good insight into where to invest."

Hobart continues to create excellent content by investing in the business and himself in new ways. "I saw that a lot of traffic came to our site for geology," he explains, "but then people would stick around to read about gems. So at age 65, I went back to school to earn a graduate gemologist diploma from the Gemological Institute of America, to enable me to write high-quality articles about gems. It turned out to be a great business decision; those are some of our highest-performing articles and get high-earning contextual advertisements."

With new articles constantly added to the site, Hobart continues to let his passion shine and share his expertise with the world. "Our traffic spikes in the fall with students visiting the site for schoolwork," he says, "and it’s rewarding for me to be able to help people learn about mineralogy. We get a lot of traffic from countries in Asia as well, because there are almost no mineralogy textbooks in other regions, so Geology.com really serves as a textbook for students across the globe. That’s why I believe keeping content on our site free is really important, because we’re helping students learn."