• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, October 31, 2005

When veteran Internet marketer Robert Tas co-founded the Triathlon Association of New York City nearly two years ago, it marked the culmination of his transformation from stressed-out worker bee to leader in the fitness community. After learning more about fitness junkies, he decided to unite his professional and personal passions.

The result: Tas Interactive's Active Athlete Advertising Network, an aggregation of fitness-focused sites designed for marketers that want to reach triathletes, marathoners, and other hard-core jocks. Tas, who worked at 24/7 Real Media and Tacoda Systems, says that sites like TriathleteMag.com and MarathonGuide.com have had a hard time attracting marketers' attention. "They were too small individually to get onto the agency radar," he says. Together, though, their audience boasts attractive demographics: college graduates with annual incomes in the $100,000 range. "They spend a ton of money on their gear and the Internet is their primary resource for information," Tas claims.

Tas has ambitious goals: He projects that the Active Athlete Advertising Network sites will double the nearly one million unique visitors per month it currently lures by the end of the first quarter of 2006. He says the traffic will come mostly through the addition of sites for hikers, adventure racers, and golfers. "We want to be the ESPN.com for active athletes," he adds.