Doug Dohring

Serial entrepreneur Doug Dohring began his career in market research when he founded The Dohring Company (http://www.dohring.com/) in 1986, which specialized in retail, entertainment, and automotive research and grew to be included on Advertising Age’s 1995 list of the top-100 market research firms and the Los Angeles Business Journal’s list of the fastest-growing companies in the same year. Doug Dohring transitioned into the nascent online research industry of the late 1990s, creating OpinionSurveys.com, which conducted online consumer surveys and generated millions of user accounts. OpinionSurveys.com was later purchased by public company Greenfield Online.

In late 1999, Doug Dohring agreed to acquire neopets.com, a virtual pet website that had launched just a few weeks earlier. Within a few months, Mr. Dohring incorporated the website and its properties as NeoPets, Inc., and introduced a novel advertising strategy to generate revenue. Trademarked as “Immersive Advertising,” the practice relied on organic, interactive, and contextual methods of reaching users and helped drive the company to profitability by the end of 2000. Mr. Dohring sold NeoPets to Viacom for $160 million in 2005, at a time when the website was generating in excess of 5 billion page views per month and was the top-ranked website in America for both page views per user and time spent per user.

After NeoPets, Doug Dohring set about creating an engaging online curriculum web resource for families and educators, founding Age of Learning, Inc. - http://www.ageoflearning.com - in 2007. After four years of development, he and a team of early childhood education experts launched ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy, a supplemental educational resource that is in widespread use in American homes and in more than 45,000 kindergarten and pre-kindergarten classrooms. More than one billion learning activities have been completed on ABCmouse.com.