Counting on ethnic connections on the Net Former banker gets the numbers with 3 sites; still waiting for profits BY ALEXIA VARGAS BENJAMIN SUN IS NOT ONLY betting that he can make money on the Web, but that he can do it by targeting ethnic groups. In the past four years, his Manhattan-based company, Communi-ty Connect Inc., has launched three on-line communities aimed at Asian-Americans, African-Americans and most recently Hispanics. Unlike other ethnic-oriented sites, Community Connect has been able to obtain financial backing, lure ad-vertisers and garner a strong re-sponse from its target audience. His three sites, AsianAve-nue.com, BlackPlanet.com and Mi-Gente.com, combined boast more than 2 million registered members and more than 320 million page views a month. it's inexpensive to build, and it's what people want," says Mr. Sun, president and chief executive. Mr. Sun's master plan is to tap into the growing use of the Inter-net by ethnic groups. According to Forrester Research Inc., Internet usage among Asian-Americans is greater than that of any other de-mographicÑabout 69% of them are on-line. About 47% of Hispan-ics and 33% of African-Americans are now cybersurfers. A former investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co., Mr. Sun be-lieves his company's model will work because it provides members with a distinctive medium for voic-ing opinions. The company uses the same software for all three Web sites, thus cutting costs. Community Connect managed to impress Sandler Capital Man-agement with its strategy Last March, the Manhattan-based firm raised about $15 million in the first round of institutional investment. That money comes on top of more than $4 million raised in the past two years from angel investors like Robert Goldhammer, former vice chairman of Kidder Peabody. "The U.S. doesn't understand the importance of ethnicity," says Mr. Goldhammer, now a board member at Community Connect. "There's nothing more important in the future of the U.S. than what Mr. Sun is doing." Mr. Sun, 27, says his company isn't profitable yet, but he expects it to be within the next 18 months. During the first 10 months of this year, Community Connect has ex-perienced a 400% increase in ad-vertising revenues, compared with all of last year. Advertising cus-tomers include giants Hewlett-Packard and General Motors. "AsianAvenue and BlackPlanet's audiences are a perfect match for the demographics that we're going after," says Art Price, multi-cultural marketing manager at Hewlett-Packard Co. But even though Mr. Sun can spout data showing there's an ea-ger audience for ethnic-oriented content like personal home pages, chat rooms and games, some ana-lysts and investment bankers ques-tion whether companies like Com-munity Connect are really providing anything that's not al-ready available on bigger portals like America Online or Yahoo! "You need to offer something more than a one-size-fits-all eth-nic portal," says Ekaterina O. Walsh, a senior analyst at Forrester. "The Internet rewards specialists." To address criticism like that, Mr. Sun and his team, which in-cludes MSNBC and WNBC-TV Internet analyst Omar Wasow, plan to soon roll out an on-line diversity recruiting service as anoth-er source of revenue.