Austin Company Launches European Reptile and Amphibian Portal

Austin Company Launches European Reptile and Amphibian Portal

June 6, 2000, - AUSTIN, Tx. -- OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc.,
a privately held corporation, announced today that it has launched
a european reptile and amphibian portal, kingsnake.com europe
(http://kingsnake.co.uk) as a companion to its
existing reptile and amphibian web community, kingsnake.com
(http://www.kingsnake.com). The successful kingsnake.com
site, the internets largest community of reptile and
amphibian hobbyists, contains over a hundred message
boards, classified ads, streaming audio web casts, and
hosts over 400 business web sites in the rapidly growing
reptile and amphibian pet industry.

"While internet use in Europe is still far less common
than in North America, net access costs are dropping quickly
and we anticipate that Europe will soon catch up." Said
Jeff Barringer, President of OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc.
"Our european traffic has already been running at 15-20%
each month so we already have significant traction in the
marketplace"

The new site will have features such as message boards,
classified ads, feature articles, chat, and other features in
the french, german, dutch, spanish, swedish, enlish, and
italian languages intitally, with plans to add portugese,
polish, russian, and finnish languages soon.

In true guerilla start-up fashion, OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc.,
owners of the kingsnake.com web site, still operate the
business from living rooms and garages. "This started as
a hobby in 1994 and evolved into a business. Since then our
growth has been enormous. We now see over 40,000 visitors a day"

kingsnake.com was ranked in the top 6000 most popular
web sites by Alexa Internet (http://www.alexa.com), a
free and independent Web navigation service which tracks
website activity around the globe and collates information
from Internet users.

In February the independent web analysis firm PCData Online
(http://www.pcdata.com) ranked kingsnake.com at 8,020 in popularity
(based on unique visits over a six month period) among the literally
millions of web sites on the internet. PCData Online tracks Internet
traffic to web sites and conducts custom polls and
studies through its sample population of home Internet users.

Both rankings place the kingsnake.com site within the top 1%
most popular web sites on the internet.

Like many other dot com's OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc.,
has struggled against enormous odds.Un-like many
other dot com's they built the business
without outside investment. "In 1999 we
shopped our business plan around to a variety of
venture capital firms and angel investors but we
were unable to secure any capital. They either
didn't understand our business, it didn't fit their
model, we needed too much money, we didn't need enough money,
it was always something. Meanwhile we built, and will continue to
build, our business the old fashioned way, based on revenues.
While this has throttled our ability to add features and
services and expand into other marketplaces, it has not slowed
our traffic growth. We continue to add new vendors and users
on a daily basis. While other Austin based dot com's are
struggling to survive, we have been running this without
the benefits or the problems associated with venture capital
or angels.

One of kingsnake.com's vendors, commercial live insect vendor New York
Worms has seen its fortunes grow along with the kingsnake.com web site.
"We were early vendors and believers in the kingsnake.com site and
we have literally built our online business around its user base"
said Carlton Smith, one of the owners of New York Worms.

Amazon Reptile Center owner Scott Solar agrees. "When we opened
our retail pet center in Montclair, California last year and
wanted to launch our web site we knew that by hosting it at
kingsnake.com we would immediately see traffic.
When we launched the site we sold so much product we almost
didn't have enough left for the retail facility"

In March 2000 OnlineHobbyist.com, expanded its web community
presence by launching a new series of pet communities under
the name of PetHobbyist (http://www.pethobbyist.com) with
each segment of the pet hobby receiving its own community.

OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc. (http://www.onlinehobbyist.com) is a
privately held company formed in 1999, based on the success of the
former kingsnake.com publications, to build web based communities of
hobbyists. Headquarters are in Austin, Texas, USA.
OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc. web communities include:

             http://www.PetHobbyist.com
             http://www.kingsnake.com
             http://kingsnake.co.uk
             http://www.BirdHobbyist.com
             http://www.AquariumHobbyist.com
             http://www.InsectHobbyist.com
             http://www.CritterHobbyist.com
             http://www.DogHobbyist.com
             http://www.CatHobbyist.com
             http://www.ExoticHobbyist.com
             http://www.HorseHobbyist.com
             http://www.KitHobbyist.com

CONTACT: Jeff Barringer, President
and CEO, OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc.
Tel: +1 512 990 1092
E-Mail: jeffb@kingsnake.com
URL: http://www.onlinehobbyist.com

CONTACT: Carlton Smith, President
CEO, New York Worms.
Tel: +1 516 759-3538 phone
E-Mail: info@nyworms.com
URL: http://www.nyworms.com

CONTACT: Scott Solar, President,
Amazon Reptile Center.
Tel: +1 909 447-5103 phone
E-Mail: scott@amazonreptile.com
URL: http://www.amazonreptile.com