September 11, 2012
Two years ago, Shravan Goli, CEO of the online educational company Dictionary.com, returned from the annual TechCrunch entrepreneurs’ summer conference brimming with ideas about the marketing potential of a new technology called application program interface, or API. “There are all these people [who] are building word games online, and they can use API with our content,” he told Lisa Sullivan Cross, vice president of marketing and development at Dictionary.com, which is a $1 billion subsidiary of the Internet conglomerate IAC.
Cross picked up the ball from there, making “a list of about 30 top-tier partners that we wanted to go after,” she recalls. Over the next several weeks, she and Goli discussed the potential traffic, customers and cost. For instance, after people play the word game Boggle online, Cross said, they would see a list of all the words they used, along with a pop-up ad announcing, “This definition is powered by Dictionary.com.”
