Nameberry

“What’s in a name?” That’s the question that Pamela Redmond’s been asking herself for decades — a lifelong passion that formed the backbone of ten bestselling books on names she wrote with her writing partner Linda Rosenkrantz. Her content aims to help parents make well-informed decisions about their children’s names, while having some fun doing it.

“We had been pushed to make a site for a while, but we always said we were name experts — not web developers. So for a while we resisted,” says Pamela. But she and Linda decided to go for it, hiring a designer and engineer who could translate the information of their books into a dynamic digital presence.

As you can imagine, Pamela and Linda put a lot of thought into naming their site. Nameroni, namefish, namerhood, nomdebaby… those were just a few of the options that were floated. But finally, after consulting with some discerning friends, Nameberry was born.

“We were about to launch when a friend who'd worked in digital media asked me what we were going to do about SEO, and I said, ‘What's that?’” says Linda, who hadn’t even considered strategies for driving traffic to the site.

But after Pamela’s post about avoiding hipster baby names went viral, traffic was suddenly coming to Nameberry — so she and her team needed to figure out a way to harness this activity and turn their young site into a thriving business.

With the content of the site humming along, it was time to think bigger. One day, Pamela met with the site’s CTO and Co-Creator, Hugh Hunter who had an idea for a feature: Baby Name DNA.

“I didn’t really even know what the feature was yet, but I loved the name Baby Name DNA, so I knew I wanted to do something with it,” recalls Pamella.

Hugh explained that it’d be a data-driven tool that analyzes your deep preferences for name qualities, such as popularity and unconventionality, then matches you with names that have the same “DNA.” The more you play around with the tool, the smarter it gets — and the more accurate its personalized lists of name ideas get.

This sort of ambitious idea never would have been possible before ad revenue. But now Pamela and her team had the resources to hire external designers and coders who could bring Baby Name DNA to life.

Additionally, Baby Name DNA took so much of Pamela’s time and energy that she needed to expand the editorial staff to oversee things in her stead — which, again, was possible thanks to ad revenue from Google ads.

Pamela appreciates that Google helps her own the site 100%. Because they’re sustainable purely through ad revenue, they haven’t had to take outside investment and become reliant on some larger publishing organization. This helps her maintain the integrity of the site and stay independent.

“We're not ruled by SEO, we're not ruled by some owner that's looking for a certain kind of profit,” says Pamela. “We just want to produce great content and do it in a way that really shows off what's special about us, which is that we truly are experts and we're not approaching this cynically.”

“I love names and I always have,” says Pamela. “My interest never wanes, even through 35 years of professionally writing about them. Running Nameberry makes me feel like I'm following a passion I’ve had since I was a child — and knowing that I've changed the world of names in a major and positive way.”