We’re already the cat’s meow for the most intensive of cat and dog owners. However, last summer, we decided to be just as meaningful to more mainstream dog and cat owners. For every person who loves making pet profile pages and making friends online, there are 100 people who simply need the internet for fast, resourceful help with their pets. Now when you arrive at our site you see just as much information and as many resources as you do sociality and entertainment features.

As hoped, this is leading to significant growth in usage and growing our business very quickly.

The change is so significant that it’s tough to call ourselves a “community” any longer. Keeping our community passionate and engaged is still a top priority, but we’re now really vertical portals (Egads, vortal alert!) and will significantly grow our reach, as Scott Rafer would say, “by a couple orders of magnitude.”

The following features have been added to Dogster/Catster since our strategic shift.

Dogster Answers & Catster Answers – If you love your pet you know how heart-wrenching it can be when something is wrong. Whether it is a health problem, puppy training setback, grooming issue or nearly any question, our community will answer. You will get several different points of view from the most knowledgeable, passionate pet-lovers on the planet. In the last 6 months over 27,000 answers have been posted to over 8,000 questions. To complement the community answers, we recently added nearly 10,000 free expert vet answers from a partnership with Just Answers.

Dog Owner’s Manual & Cat Owner’s Manual – These are two very informational and fun books we have put in a searchable, indexed online format in a partnership with Quirk Books. They cover almost everything a new dog or cat owner would need to know. Commenting allows site members to add their own experiences and advice.

Dog Breed Finder - Enter what kind of dog you are looking for, and we’ll tell you which breeds are best for you.

Dog Breed Quiz – Being meaningful to more internet users also means providing quick, engaging fun. Our tongue-in-jowl 10 page survey will tell you what kind of dog breed you are. In less than a month over 125,000 people have taken it; 75% are non-members. In fact last week it started ranking very well for quiz and quizzes in Google and blew our virality quotient out of the water (take that Facebook apps). ;)

Blogs – Our blogs are starting to strike a chord with pet lovers. Our flagship blog, For the Love of Dog Blog, covers dog news while our new Vet Blog by Dr. Eric Barchas, DVM is becoming a must-read. Our dog/cat of the day honorifics have been put into blog format as well. Another five blogs, from cats to legal issues to humor, will launch this month.

Dog Adoption Center & Cat Adoption Center – Our adoption area is a great way to find a dog or a cat who will love you forever! We have tools to help a would-be adopter search through all the adoptable pets on our sites by many different criteria. With our partner 9 Lives, we’ve published a lot of guidance on rescuing and adopting.

Dogster Local Listings & Catster Local Listings – Perhaps you have seen a Dogster Local or Catster Local sticker in a pet store or vet office near you? It wouldn’t be a surprise, because we have over 110k pet-friendly business in our Local Listings area. We have all the core business information, reviews, photos and more. Members can “mark a spot,” and the listings are cross-referenced on their pet profile pages. Special shelter and rescue accounts tie into the Adoption Center.

Our immediate goal is to pass one million unique users and 30 million pages served per month.

At the rate we are growing, we will achieve the goals by mid-summer. Direct ad sales people will know more unique visitors means more advertisers are interested in participating, and more pages served means more inventory to share with them. While Dogster/Catster will always have strong communities, it no longer seems fitting to refer to our sites exclusively as communities. If you can think of better name than “vertical portal,” by all means share it. We can’t help but chuckle that we are going back to the future in building the “it” site for everything dog and cat. However, two-thirds of U.S. households have pets, making pets a $42 billion business, so we’ve got our Flux Capacitors set on full-steam ahead.