Doug’s Mouthpiece - Droug.co.uk

Duncan Horton - master skateboarder

Duncan is a sexy bloke:

Duncan Horton is Chief Executive of online classifieds business Freeads.co.uk, working alongside his long time lover Stuart Parish…….only kidding:)

The pair worked together at Holiday Autos, the noddy car hire dealer:)), prior to that company being acquired by travel e-tailer, LastMinute.com in 2003.

Following merging of the businesses, Horton assumed responsibility for LastMinute’s portfolio of 16 core web sites, overseeing a migration to a single platform in an exercise costing over 15 million GBP.

During their time together at LastMinute Horton and Parish achieved considerable benefits through consolidation and by making the advertising and search approach much more efficient. This resulted in major improvement in economies of spend, and great paid search results, through making the business re-focus on its main objectives and what it was actually delivering to websites.

Following a period of managerial changes at LastMinute, Horton and Parish moved on in 2007,……peeded off were we boys???? Taking over control of the then 6 years old Freeads brand. A major backer of Freeads is Clive Jacobs, founder of car hire giant Holiday Autos, who bought a major stake in the business in early 2007.

FreeAds had established a reasonable user base, together with a largely untapped mailing list of somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 names, and the team have since set about revitalising the site. Utilising the simple concept of FreeAds the site has seen consistent growth in terms of market share and visitors (Unique visitors were 1.3 million in OCtober 2007). Recent deals to promote cross-branding and the establishment of regional and international markets continue to raise the FreeAds brand.

FreeAds is the largest independent UK classifieds site, is based in Windsor, and according to their Website, hosts over 80,000 unique ads each day. Duncan spends a lot of time on his Blackberry…………….

Doug loves Duncan

people you should know written by Doug Scott