Rob Thrasher
Robert George "Rob" Thrasher II (born in Utica, New York on February 20, 1967) is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, author and one of the founders of the Search Engine Marketing and optimization industry as highlighted in a New York Times article on November 11, 1996.
Rob and his partners also founded CyberVillage in 1995 in an effort to produce an electronic community for the Mohawk Valley in the Utica-Rome area of Upstate New York. CyberVillage was the fifth Virtual Community on the Internet. The project was mostly unaccepted by the community and widely considered a failed experiment. In 2012, CyberVillage was rebuilt from the ground up as a series of social networking blogs built on the Wordpress blogging platform. The two groups of sites, CyberVillage.com and CyberVillage.biz, include news and shopping sites. Rob said the sites do not currently generate revenue, but they currently have 144,000 pages in Google's database, and it continues to grow slowly.