HealthContentAdvisors

Health Content: Going for the Gold, Not Glitz

• Posted March 13th 2008
• by Janice

Healthline, which maintains its own consumer healthcare portal site while also licensing technology and content to other healthcare sites, has announced an agreement with Aetna to supply Healthline’s search and related tools to Aetna’s new SmartSource healthcare search engine.

This deal serves as a reminder that the open Web is not the only place where healthcare consumers connect with online medical information. While much attention is being lavished on the glitzy consumer health portals, few have noted that most of them are too broadly focused and without differentiation. Everything from healthy lifestyle information, disease-specific information, to drug data, calorie counters, and social networking discussion groups are all thrown together on one site. Sites such as Revolution Health, WebMD, iVillage Your Total Health, About.com/Health are all beginning to look alike.

While the overabundance of content is becoming increasingly hard to navigate, the reason behind it is clear – ad dollars. All of these health care portals are following the money, and they need to keep building inventory to attract ever more advertisers. While the potential advertising pot is in the billions of dollars, it is unclear who, among the current crop of consumer healthcare sites, will attract sufficient traffic and ad dollars to be the long term winners in this very competitive space.

What does this mean for publishers of medical information and healthcare-related content. It means that expected revenue from ad-share deals with consumer healthcare portals on the open Web remains unpredictable, and wise publishers should also seek deals with alternative distribution channels like employee benefits sites that are sponsored by the healthcare payers: employers and health insurers. In the Healthline deal, the Aetna Navigator site is on the Internet with access by password. In other cases, employers host Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) on intranets and typically include information about all benefits programs. But regardless of the implementation, these sites deliver a sizeable audience that is craving content that is more tailored to their needs, and health content publishers would be wise to pursue these less obvious but still rich channels.