Unlike mortgage, those in education lead generation have continued to experience strong, and in some cases staggering growth. One of those in the latter is CourseAdvisor, who is set to be acquired by The Washington Post. If like me, you scratched your head trying to understand the connection, The Washington Post owns Kaplan, a business unit that will do more than $2bn in revenues for 2007. While it offers the well known test prep services, Kaplan has over the past several years become a major player in the online education space.
Similar to another online education superstar, Vantage Media (which recently topped Deloitte's Los Angeles Technology Fast 50 ranking) CourseAdvisor generates its leads using sophisticated technology in paid search. Their quality doesn't equal that of organic search leader eLearners.com, but the scale and time frame in which they achieved it is stunning. It's not the first move in the lead generation space for the Post which invested in EducationConnection.com but that company lacked the traffic acquisition prowess of CourseAdvisor.
Price supposedly close to if not slightly exceeding $100 million.
