July 27th, 2009 — Mass High Tech — Wakefield-based CourseAdvisor Inc. has changed its name to Avenue100 Media Solutions Inc. and is moving to a new headquarters in Woburn in order to accommodate a doubling of its current staff, planned for the coming two years. The name change is intended to reflect a broadening of the digital marketing company’s business model beyond higher education.

Launched in 2005, CourseAdvisor is an online lead-generation service for college admissions departments that uses a search platform and data warehouse to match prospective students with schools they might be interested in. The company draws web traffic through search-term campaigns on the Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines, said co-founder and chairman Greg Titus.

Now at 50 employees, the company is adding staff “almost weekly,” Titus said. Revenues are now at about $5 million a month, he said. Titus declined to disclose the exact location of its new site, but said the company will move once the facility is ready.

The company now plans to bring the tools it has developed for education lead-gen into other areas. The CourseAdvisor brand will remain alive, but as Avenue100, the company plans to branch out into other areas, including financial aid and job search.

“The beauty of education is you can use it to leverage into all types of subject areas,” Titus said.

CourseAdvisor is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post Co. (NYSE: WPO), since the Post acquired the company in October, 2007 for undisclosed terms.

In the first quarter of 2009, the Post Co. reported $9.5 million in revenue from its “other businesses” category, which included CourseAdvisor, representing a 14 percent drop below Q1 2008. In the final quarter of 2008, the Post Co. recorded a $69.7 million write-down of CourseAdvisor’s intangible assets, to account for slower-than-expected revenue growth. Nonetheless, CourseAdvisor brought in $9.3 million in Q4 2008 — about 41 percent more than Q4 2007, when the Post Co. reported $6.6 million in revenue from its newly acquired subsidiary. — Galen Moore