Christopher Parr, in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, created Pursuitist .com, an online publication dedicated to the pursuit of luxury and the advertisers who work the small but enduring and lucrative niche.

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The rich will be with us always. Which makes marketing to them a pretty good bet.

So figures Christopher Parr.

"This audience," said Parr, founder of a website that caters to those interested in, say, Petrossian caviar, $38,000 Hermès bags or the new Dior boutique in Courchevel, France, "does not go away."

Hence, Pursuitist.com, Parr's online publication dedicated to the pursuit of luxury — and the advertisers who work the small but enduring and lucrative niche.

Parr, a 46-year-old digital marketing veteran in Madison, launched Pursuitist in July 2011. Since then, he's built a sizable viewer base with a strategy that drives traffic to the site in significant part through canny use of social media.

A Facebook site tied to Pursuitist boasts an impressive number of fans and an unusually high level of engagement by users. Pursuitist itself, meanwhile, claims 210,000 unique visitors a month and, according to Parr, is turning a profit.

It's also providing some nice side benefits for its founder. Pursuitist relies largely on posts from freelance writers, but the Kenosha-born Parr, who authored plays while at Viterbo College in La Crosse and went on to get a master's of fine arts at Brandeis University, writes too, concentrating on food, wine and travel.

Oh, how he labors.

He writes about the taste of $25,000-a-bottle Rémy Martincognac ("floral notes of jasmine, rose and violets").

Or about visiting the new Four Seasons hotel in St. Petersburg, Russia ("Outstanding. Remarkable. Memorable."); the multimillion-dollar homes for sale inside Walt Disney World ("brilliantly built with an incredible attention to detail"); and an idyllic Thai island to stay at the Conrad Koh Samui resort ("aplace where senses are triggered and then overwhelmed").

Those trips were paid for by the subjects of the posts — not unusual in the travel-writing world — but Parr said he pays for most of his trips.

Luxury-brand advertisers

He's a former marketing executive at Sub-Zero/Wolf, a Madison-based maker of high-end kitchen equipment. In the '90s, he created an award-winning humor website, and he has developed online strategies for a number of Wisconsin firms.

His two-minute video, "How to make perfect steaks," featured on the site of his marketing firm, Parr Interactive, has 1.4 million hits on YouTube.

With Pursuitist, Parr isn't looking for window shoppers or show-us-the-closets gawkers.

"At the core," Parr said, "I wanted to serve up premium affluent consumers to premium advertisers. ... I never wanted to go mass with this site."

The increasing concentration of wealth and the disproportionate gains by the rich suggest a solid foundation for such a strategy.

According to University of California, Berkeley, economist Emmanuel Saez, for example, real income for the top 1% of U.S. families grew by 86% from 1993 through 2012. The real gain for the rest: 6.6%.

Mickey Alam Khan, editor of industry trade publication Luxury Daily, called Parr "a smart guy."

But, Khan added, Pursuitist is in a highly competitive market speckled with many magazines and blogs going after the same pool of luxury-brand advertising dollars.

'Unheard of' engagement

A growing share of Pursuitist's traffic, 33% last month, comes from an affiliated Facebook page called Luxury.

Launched in July 2010, Luxury has accumulated 550,000 fans — far more than the more-established Facebook pages of better-known upscale publications such as Condé Nast Traveler, Saveur and the Robb Report.

And the engagement rate on Luxury — the frequency at which visitors "like" a post, comment or take some other action — is astronomical.

By one measure, Luxury's rate stands at around 60%. The rates of pages for Condé Nast Traveler, Saveur, Architectural Digest and the Robb Report, meanwhile, all fall between 6% and 9%.

"Unheard of," Sarah Van Elzen, director of social media at Hanson Dodge Creative in Milwaukee,said of Luxury's figure.

Is Luxury/Pursuitist using "click farms" to buy fans?

"No, not at all," Parr said. "It's all organic and great content. That's what it's all about. And this has been our main investment, to build the channel."

Besides links to Pursuitist articles, the Luxury page on Facebook is packed with unrelated postings, particularly striking photographs of exotic destinations. These are often shared by hundreds of Facebook users and "liked" by thousands, helping to drive Luxury's huge engagement numbers.

It's an example of what's known as a "passion page," a Facebook page with a high volume of posts on a theme, in this case luxury goods and experiences. Such pages create content "that people all over the world want to share," Justin Lafferty, editor at Inside Facebook, a San Francisco-area blog covering the social media platform, said in an email.

Times of India deal

As a business, Pursuitist is tiny — four employees, including Parr, plus seven regular contributors. The site made it into the black last year, Parr said, and is looking to grow. He said he has turned down purchase offers.

"I want to continue building this brand and seeing where we can go next," Parr said. "In my opinion we're at the infancy of where it is growing."

The latest development is a partnership with The Times of India news organization to launch an Indian edition of Pursuitist. Possibly on the horizon: an e-commerce feature selling a single item each day, and a system for ranking new cars, hotels, restaurants and such by luxury-oriented people.

"I want to have like-minded consumers sharing like-minded destinations or products," Parr said.

He occasionally gets mocked in famously left-leaning Madison for his website's focus on pricey consumption far beyond the reach of most. But the ribbing is good-natured.

And besides, Parr said, "I'm also liberal."