Sickweather, illness-mapping startup, now offers free ad space to potential sponsors as traffic grows

Sickweather‘s recent spate of press has been beneficial for the Cockeysville-based startup: more than 11,000 unique visitors have clicked over to the illness-mapping website in the last two weeks.
“[That] is up over 730 percent from the same timeframe last year,” said CEO Graham Dodge, one of three who co-founded Sickweather in fall 2011.
Surely a brief mention on “The Today Show” helps out, as does combing through Twitter and Facebook status updates to predict a woeful flu season six weeks ahead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But beyond the publicity, the metrics numbers Dodge now touts — traffic up 730 percent compared to last year, 10,000 members signed up on Sickweather.com — offer a glimpse at one piece of the startup’s money-making strategy: paid advertising.

Although, for the last several months, Sickweather has been giving space to advertisers for … absolutely no charge.

Dodge and his team aren’t delusional (or ill, for that matter). Since Sickweather still lacks the traffic to its website to justify charging even small sums for advertising, offering space to approved clients is a way for the team to try out its Beta Advertiser Program, courting approved advertisers, building a sales relationship, and then transitioning these beta advertisers into paying advertisers once web traffic starts climbing.
Sickweather signed on Help Remedies in May 2012, then Cold-EEZE in September 2012. Community Health Network in Indiana, Colonial Healthcare in South Carolina, FluNada, AirVita and AllergEase are also among a pilot group of advertisers whose ads are just now starting to run on Sickweather.com.

“We’re mostly looking for brands/services that either fill a need that we don’t already have [cold remedy, flu remedy, headache, etc.] and regional partners [one urgent care clinic or hospital per region],” said Dodge by e-mail. Advertising appears on either the home page or as “sponsored map markers.” (Zoom in on Columbus, S.C., on the Sickweather map online, and you’ll see such markers.)
As of this week, Dodge said, Sickweather had “hit the lower end of our threshold for converting our beta advertisers into paid advertisers, and we look forward to taking our first steps in generating revenue this quarter.” Dodge also said beta advertisers will be able to set their own prices for ads “once their competitors take an interest.”
In other words, beta advertisers will receive discounted pricing, as long as the Sickweather team can convince would-be advertisers of the site’s potential value. If site traffic continues to climb, that could prove an easy case to make, especially since site visitors need not be Sickweather.com members to view the site’s symptom-tracking data or the advertisements that appear.
More interesting than just an initial foray into advertising is the manner in which Dodge and Jonas Lichty, Sickweather’s director of business development, got advertisers to sign on in the first place. Going to the advertising agencies was a dead end, as the agencies seemed suspicious of promises of free advertising (and thought a zero-dollar charge would look conspicuous to clients).
Instead, Sickweather went through the executive leadership or marketing departments at each of its beta advertisers’ companies. Cold-EEZE, for instance, came on as a result of Dodge’s e-mailing the CEO.
“We’ve learned to avoid the ad agencies as the main entry point,” Dodge said.
For now, Dodge and the Sickweather team hope its advertising play begins generating revenue, no matter how small. He works full-time on both Sickweather and as the marketing director of CPA firm KatzAbosch, logging 90-hour work weeks and “starving” his family of attention.
But Dodge said he “wouldn’t do it any other way.”
“My employer benefits from the experience I’m gaining with Sickweather, and vice versa,” he said.  “It’s not what investors want to hear, but so far they haven’t been much help anyway.”