HealthContentAdvisors

Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category

Healthline’s Semantic Ad Network for Health Content

• Posted June 9th 2008
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• by Janice

Healthline, announced today its entry into the vertical ad network business with its healthcare-focused media network called HealthSTAT™ On-Demand.  HealthSTAT is a welcome addition for medical and healthcare publishers that need new options for revenue generation beyond AdSense and the other general search engine ad networks.  HealthSTAT joins other recent entries in the healthcare ad network space, including IAC/The Health Central Network and Glam Media. Healthline’s initial group of publishing partners includes some trusted traditional brand names and some new entrants (AARP, USNews.com, Time Inc.’s new Health.com, PracticeFusion, Elder.com, HealthPricer, and JustAnswer), as well as its own Healthline.com portal and a new consumer health portal to be launched by United Health later this year, MyOptumHealth. 

We’ve noted before that online health sites that rely primarily on pharma advertising revenue are showing slow and disappointing results. It’s time to think beyond the pharma companies as the only source of ad dollars for consumer health sites.  What impresses me about Healthline (an InfoCommerce 2006 winner), is its understanding of sponsorship opportunities. Its recent deal with Aetna and the signing of United Health in this new ad network show that Healthline recognizes insurers are good publishing partners.  It is important to note that these same insurers should be good prospects as advertisers on the HealthSTAT ad network, too. 

There will undoubtedly be more entrants in the healthcare vertical ad network market. Healthline, with its much-touted medical taxonomy, has built a good technical foundation on which to build its ad network.  But it’s Healthline’s demonstrated ability to form partnerships with important stakeholders that puts it ahead of competitors.

 

Alternative Healthcare Website Launches

• Posted April 30th 2008
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• by Marji

The Holistic Option Inc. this week announced the launch of a website that will serve as a source for consumers seeking information about alternative healthcare as well as practitioners and schools in their area. Consumers can use the site to educate themselves about holistic treatment options spanning 50 modalities, from acupuncture to massage therapy.

Access to the site’s content is free and includes natural remedies for treating specific ailments, as well as articles, videos, podcasts, discussion forums and shopping.

The Holistic Option has created a screening process to ensure the accuracy of practitioner information. To be listed on the site, practitioners must submit an application that is reviewed by The Holistic Option’s advisory board to ensure proper member certification and professional credibility in their specific practice. The site currently hosts practitioners and educational information in 25 modalities, but will add more than 25 additional modalities in the upcoming months.

The site has several advertising options, from banner ads to enewsletters and articles to podcasts.

Alternative healthcare is certainly of interest to many consumers, and perhaps such a site will help promote it and bring more prominence to this field. With a variety of content sources and formats, the site is certainly positioned for success. You can’t launch a site these days without videos and podcasts. Just plain text doesn’t make the cut anymore.

The listings of practitioners and schools will also help to add value–and credibility–to the site. It’s good to know that The Holistic Option plans to carefully screen listing practitioners before their information is posted. Having clean (and reliable) data from the start is crucial in developing such an enterprise.

 

WebMD: No Immunity to Ad Pullback

• Posted April 24th 2008
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• by Janice

WebMD, the bellwether of the online health information sites, is suffering from ad pullback.  It was widely reported this week that WebMD has lowered its guidance for 2008 and its stock has been punished as a result.   S&P has downgraded the stock to a sell and cut its target price to $23.

Concern about lower-than-expected pharma advertising was a major factor in the downgrade.  But, WebMD is not entirely dependent on online ads for its revenue, which mitigates the financial picture. WebMD is also a leading provider of online continuing medical educations (CME) programs, and also provides private portals and custom publishing.

Some seem to relish bad news about WebMD and are quick to ascribe the slowdown in pharma advertising for WebMD to competition from newer players that offer less-costly ad alternatives. See, for instance, the comments in Silicon Alley Insider.  We firmly believe that ad dollars will continue to shift online.  However, the advertising sector is notoriously cyclical, and considering the current economic climate, the ad pullback is likely to prove contagious in the short term.

 

Vertical Ad Networks Still in Experimental Phase

• Posted April 17th 2008
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• by Janice

The Health Central Network (THCN) and IAC’s Advertising Sales (IAC/AS) group announced the launch of a new health advertising network this week. THCN owns and operates a collection of healthcare-focused websites, with a core collection of disease-specific sites such as My Migraine Connection and My Allergy Network, which were either acquired or built. Owning the sites gives THCN the ability to impose common standards, tools, and interoperability among the sites and unites them under a single strong brand that appeals to advertisers that want to reach consumers who are seeking information about disease management and healthcare.

Health Central’s new agreement with IAC/AS now provides them with a strong vertical ad network in addition to substantial ad sales resources for serving the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, the relationship between IAC and THCN goes well beyond this cooperative ad network. IAC made a significant minority investment in THCN in January, which PaidContent.org has reported at $50 million.

Glam Media competes with THCN/IAC for the same pharmaceutical and health-related consumer product ad dollars, but with a different vertical ad network model. Glam, which raised an additional $85 million in February, has also assembled a substantial collection of related websites that in the aggregate attract tens of millions of visitors per month.  While THCN’s content is medically-focused, Glam’s network of sites is weighted more toward entertainment and lifestyle. But the key difference is that Glam does not own or operate most of the sites in their network. Instead they offer a range of advertising and marketing services to the affiliated publishers.

As the Web develops into a more mainstream advertising and marketing medium, both of these experiments bear watching. Advertisers and marketers will likely try out both, and success will go to whichever produces the best results.

 

Consumer Health Sites Not for the Faint of Heart

• Posted March 21st 2008
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• by Janice

Steve Case, the keynote speaker at yesterday’s EconHealth seminar, and CEO of Revolution Health, used the phrase “not for the faint of heart” to describe the current environment for producing healthcare content for the consumer market. Chris Schroeder, CEO of the HealthCentral Network, repeated the phrase in the introduction to his opening panel. It’s an apt way of summing up the themes of the seminar that focused on the money flow in early-stage digital consumer health companies.

Case used the analogy of his experience getting consumers engaged in online communication at AOL and predicted that the time horizon spans 10 to 20 years before the full “sea change” occurs in the healthcare sector. Significant additional hurdles exist in the health market, which has a complex institutional structure with layers of agents that constrain consumer choice and behavior. The agents include employers who remain the primary payers of health insurance, the health insurance companies as payer-intermediaries between consumers and providers, and government agencies that create policy and regulations—and are also a major payer of healthcare services. Layers of constraints also exist for the physicians and other healthcare professionals who offer health services.

Still, Steve and other speakers did not present a gloomy future for health content start-ups and established healthcare publishers. There is overwhelming agreement that the US is moving toward a consumer-centric healthcare system and there are ample opportunities for companies that create innovative applications to improve the efficiency of healthcare consumption. But the timing of adoption by consumers is very difficult to predict, especially in an environment of constrained choice. Deep pockets help. And, it helps to have alternative sources of revenue to keep afloat while the “tectonic shifts” in healthcare settle. Without significant resources, the most likely future for most of today’s consumer health start-ups will be acquisition by a large more diversified health content or health IT company.

 

Health Content: Going for the Gold, Not Glitz

• Posted March 13th 2008
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• 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.

 

Follow the Money

• Posted February 26th 2008
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• by Janice

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a division of HHS, has come out with a new report that projects that spending on healthcare will increase to $4.3 trillion – that’s trillion with a “t”—by 2017. That translates to 1 in every 5 dollars being spent on healthcare.

The full report, which is available on the Health Affairs website, projects an increase from 46% to 49% of the total to be paid by federal and state governments, as the baby boomers become eligible for Medicare.  That still leaves over $2 trillion in consumer spending. With that many dollars at stake, one thing is certain: advertisers will be targeting those consumer dollars.

So it is no wonder that there has been a surge in the number of consumer healthcare portals that stand ready to accept these ad dollars. Their current focus is on pharmaceutical companies as they transfer a growing percentage of their approximately $5 billion annual consumer ad budgets online. There’s no doubt that pharma ad budgets could fund quite a few consumer health portals. But, pharma companies aren’t the only potential advertisers. Medical device vendors factor in, too. Plus, with the growing demand for quality and cost data to help inform healthcare decisions, expect to see more medical practitioners (not just plastic surgeons!) and provider institutions, including hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and home health providers promoting themselves online.