LOS ANGELES -- WebSideStory seems like your typical Internet startup -- until you discover the private company spurns venture capital, is making a profit, and believes in banner ads.

Blaise Barrelet, CEO of WebSideStory, said the company would go public without the benefit of external cash, contacts, and the buzz that the right venture capital firm can bring to a startup.

Speaking from Spring Internet World in Los Angeles, where the company showcased its Web traffic analysis service last week, Mr. Barrelet said the company had never taken venture funding or angel money, nor does it have any debt.

IT'S A HITAbout 300,000 sites currently use WebSideServer's HitBox tracker, a free Web traffic analysis tool that provides statistics on numbers of users and impressions, referring data, numbers of reloads and return visitors, visitor's screen resolution, and other information.

To use the service, webmasters need to cut and paste some Java code into their own programming and agree to feature the HitBox button on their own site. To view the data, they need to visit the HitBox.com page.

With close to 100 million hits a day and 15 million unique visitors a month, WebSideStory has been able to build and sell enough banner ads to create a small but successful business. It expects to generate more than $12 million in 1999, and take 40 to 60 percent in profits. The company also claims that it is tripling its profits each quarter and will double its staff in the next few months.

BEYOND BANNER ADSIt is not certain that the company can continue to ramp its growth based on banner advertising alone, however. As the Internet matures, Web surfers are growing bored of the ads, click-through rates are dropping, and many advertisers are looking for new ways to promote their brands online.

Mr. Barrelet does hope to introduce a second revenue stream, offering the service to corporations that are not interested in placing the HitBox button on their site. WebSideStory would provide a regular report, which it claims is more comprehensive than a log analyzer report, for a small fee.

Ironically, this business model was the original plan for the company when it was founded in San Diego in September 1996. Mr. Barrelet said it was very exciting at that time to receive 50 hits a day, and he believed people would be happy to pay for the service.

Soon, though, it became clear that webmasters were used to receiving such features on the Internet for free, and that the only way to make money was through driving traffic to the site and advertising against it. Now that the Internet has become commercialized, however, there is more demand for sophisticated services for which enterprises are willing to pay.

WebSideStory has also recently launched StatMarket, which provides statistics based on the Web habits of about 23 million Web surfers that it tracks through its service. Available information includes historical data, trend plotting, and ranking Web sites by traffic numbers. StatMarket data reveals that 45 percent of traffic flowing from search engines to Web sites originates from Yahoo (YHOO), and that use of Internet Explorer is up to 68 percent, for example.

WebSideStory is also planning the release of Yep.com, which allows Web surfers to search its 300,000 sites and have results ranked by quality or popularity. Quality is determined by factors such as traffic numbers, speed, and how often the site is bookmarked.

PIECE OF THE PIEDespite the hype surrounding dot.com companies making moonshot IPOs with no clear business model, minimal revenues, and significant losses, it is not unusual for a private Internet company to make small profits and develop a Web presence.

However, most of those startups eventually choose to take a round of funding to finance a growth spurt, ramp up marketing, and hopefully make a public offering in a blaze of Internet hype. They claim it is better to own a smaller piece of a bigger pie and are prepared to sacrifice some equity to enlarge the pie.

But Mr. Barrelet believes that creating buzz is a distraction from the business of building a company, and that WebSideStory can afford to fund its own marketing campaign. He said, "People tell me there is something wrong with my company, because it is not backed by venture capital, but we really don't need it."

Mr. Barrelet, who was born in France, said, "I am not American; I am not too aware of this U.S. venture system. In my country, if you said you were happy to make big losses spending someone else's money, they would call 911."