Family's ventures travel to the Northwest and beyond.

Byline: Winston Ross The Register-Guard

FLORENCE - As if the magazine business weren't risky enough.

Rob and Alicia Spooner were already battling rising paper and postage costs to turn a profit with their two travel magazines - Oregon Coast and Northwest Travel - from a Florence office.

Despite Rob Spooner's work with a publishing company in Washington, the two were relative newcomers to the industry. But in 1995, his fascination with the dawn of the Internet inspired the creation of Online Highways, a travel Web site that relies mostly on how many other sites link to it and how often Web surfers visit it.

By the beginning of this year, the site had lost half of its traffic, victim to the impossible-to-predict world of Internet commerce. The Spooners are doing fine now, having expanded the three ventures from three employees when they bought Oregon Coast magazine in 1988 to 70 today, including an office in India.

But the Online Highways scare was nothing to blink at.

Inktomi, a Yahoo-owned search engine, had approached Rob Spooner with a proposal for "paid inclusion" for the family's site, www.onlinehighways .com, which provides information about small towns across the United States, Canada, Mexico, parts of Europe and India.

To make money at this, Spooner relies mostly on revenue sharing with the business his site links to, a flat fee for every time someone clicks on a business from online highways or from advertisements on the site itself, which gets about 3 million hits a month.

But first people have to find Online Highways - which is where search engines such as Google and Yahoo's Inktomi come in.

Visit Google, for example, and punch in "Battle Ground Washington" and the fifth option is a link to Online Highways' description of the town, with links to area antique stores, parks and real estate, among other things. Each time you click on something, Spooner makes a little bit of money.

Inktomi's offer was for Spooner to pay the company 10 cents every time someone clicked into his site from Yahoo in exchange for being included in Yahoo's extensive index - meaning Spooner's site was more likely to pop up when someone was seeking information about a city in his catalog.

Problem was, Spooner was already in the Yahoo index. So when he ran the numbers and realized he'd lose money on virtually every click, he declined the offer - and quickly found himself bounced out of the Yahoo index altogether.

"We lost 25 percent of our traffic," he said. That was in 2002.

Then earlier this year, Yahoo yanked Google out of its index. That affected Online Highways, which still could pop up in a Yahoo search because it was listed prominently in Google.

"We lost another 25 percent. In 18 months, we'd lost half of our search engine results." That's basically half of the business.

Since then, the traffic has recovered, but the Spooners never know what the next blow will be.

It's the print medium that brought the Spooner family to Florence: wife Alicia, 56, oversees publication of the company's two magazines: Oregon Coast and Northwest Travel, and daughter Jaci, 30, heads the marketing and sales department. But the Internet venture has catapulted the company to an international scale, with a steadily increasing presence throughout the world and now a 40-employee shop in India.

"There's a lot to be said for having a family unit working on a business like this," Rob Spooner said. "They're people you can completely trust; you don't worry about them suddenly splitting off and going somewhere else with critical skills."

A lack of critical skills has proven the least of the Spooners' problems. They bought the Oregon magazine with scant idea about what it took to produce editorial content, and the Web site came online before many people even had a concept of the Internet.

But the Spooners are an adventurous lot. Consider how they met: In the 1970s, Rob Spooner had moved to Calgary, Alberta, to avoid the Vietnam War draft and Alicia was already there with her first husband, who had the same idea. After Alicia and her first husband split up, she and Rob fell in love. The couple worked to develop business applications for some of the world's first small computers.

In the early 1980s, the pair moved back to the States. Rob Spooner took a certified public accountant exam but couldn't get a job in the field, so he went to work for Pacific Search Publications in Seattle in 1984. The company fired its controller and asked Rob Spooner to run the accounting department until it found someone new. But the job became permanent, and by 1987, he was associate publisher, and Alicia Spooner was working for an accounting firm in Bremerton.

During that three-year stint, Rob Spooner happened to meet the publisher of Oregon Coast Magazine, Russ Hagen. They became acquaintances and when the job at Pacific went sour, Hagen offered to sell the magazine to the Spooners. They made the deal in 1988.

When the Spooners took over, there were only three employees other than the publisher and no editorial department. Alicia Spooner, who also knew nothing about running a magazine, decided she'd give it a shot.

After attending magazine conferences in Los Angeles and New York and recruiting experienced editors and designers, Alicia Spooner got up to speed. The tricky part, she said, was trying to figure out how to invest in enough new technology to offset rising paper and postage costs.

In 1995, as he watched the Internet rumble to life, Rob Spooner shifted his focus to Online Highways. At first, it focused on U.S. Highway 101 and a few of the highways that link to it along the Oregon Coast, providing information about restaurants, lodging, parks, food and other attractions. He later expanded the site to include towns in the rest of Oregon, then the Pacific Northwest, the entire United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe and finally, India.

Both the online and magazine productions are high-risk; when the economy suffers, so does advertising revenue. With the magazines, the biggest setbacks have been from paper and postage costs. At the Web site, any number of things can affect traffic - Inktomi's "paid inclusion" deal, for example.

"Every now and then, some bizarre thing has happened to us, and we've had to cut down on staff," Spooner said. "But we always bounce back."

The Spooners' daughter, Jaci, has worked in the family business "since I was old enough to stuff envelopes," she said.

In high school, she answered phones and worked in sales. After a year of flight school, she decided to try something different, and co-founded Central Coast Watersports, a dive and kayak shop, with a boyfriend. When the couple split in 2000, she went to work for the family as sales and marketing director.

The family gets along well, Jaci Spooner said - which may have something to do with the fact that they all work in completely different parts of the building on Highway 101.

Will she inherit the business someday?

"I've always sworn up and down I wouldn't," Jaci Spooner said.

"But you never know."

ONLINE HIGHWAYS, NORTHWEST REGIONAL MAGAZINES

Owners: Rob and Alicia Spooner

Family members involved: Three, including daughter Jaci, who heads the magazines' marketing and sales department

Employees: 30 in United States, 40 in India

Sales: More than $1 million annually in the magazines, more than $1 million with the Web site

Latest news: Expanded to India in 2003

Founded: The Spooners bought Oregon Coast magazine in 1988 and started Northwest Travel magazine in 1991; they founded Online Highways in 1995

Web site: www.onlinehighways.com and www.northwestmagazines.com