Another Health 2.0 flame-out has occurred, this time Wellsphere was picked up yesterday by HealthCentral. Not sure why HealthCentral would even remotely be interested in Wellsphere as Wellsphere is one of those companies I just could not get excited about.
Why?
Wellsphere use to SPAM me about once a month requesting that I join their community by providing a direct RSS feed of Chilmark Research postings claiming that in doing so, Chilmark Research’s visibility will grow and who knows, maybe our influence leading to fame and fortune. Each time I received one of these emails, I would head over to the Wellsphere site and take a quick look. Each time, I left unimpressed.
Wellsphere was not going to help Chilmark and if anything, probably hurt us as our reason for being is not general, consumer information, but technical information better suited for stakeholders/businesses currently in the healthcare sector or those looking for opportunties and entry points therein.
With the demise, or let’s call it folding in of Wellsphere into HealthCentral for an undisclosed sum, all those bloggers that got suckered into Wellsphere are now crying foul for not getting a piece of the action and there has been a lot of moaning, groaning and bitching in the health Blogosphere.
Please folks, get it through your head: Wellsphere was a business and as a business would take what actions it deemed necessary that were in the best interests of their founders and funders, not you. You, dear Blogger readily turned over your copyrights to Wellsphere. Is that their problem, or yours? Take this as a lesson to pay just a bit more attention to who you partner with and what interests you share that you may both profit upon. If those interests are not readily apparent, move on.
In other news…
The leading tracker of Internet traffic, comScore, just released its scores of top growing Internet properties and Everyday Health comes in at Number 5! Nice uptick for them that will certainly get the attention of advertisers. Expect Everyday Health to continue to do well as advertisers pull their funding from those sites getting less traffic, moving to quality properties. Expect more Health 2.0 flame-outs as most are still too reliant on advertising to make their business models work.
Pretty misleading data from comScore. Most media think of property equaling Web site. However, comScore is referring to networks. So when they say Everyday Health grew at 100 percent, they are actually referring to their network of sites (including lower quality sites like bikinibootcamp.com and shaqsbigchallange.com) not their actual Web site.
Yes Bob, the comScore data can be misleading in that it represents aggregate numbers for a given company and not the individual properties that they control. This is an issue that I have commented on in the past, e.g., when Steve Case/Revolution Health claimed to have higher page views (according to comScore) than WebMD. Using other Internet rating services to evaluate this claim, it was clear that Revolution Health was nowhere close to WebMD. Makes me wonder if Case is on comScore’s Board.
Getting back to this particular post, the comScore ranking was showing top growing properties and Everyday Health grew quite nicely as a result of their acquisition of Revolution Health. They still, even with Revolution Health, they have no single property that exceeds the presence of WebMD.
You wonder what comScore data would show for January? Take a look at the January Quantcast numbers for EverydayHealth (http://www.quantcast.com/everydayhealth.com). Everydayhealth.com is down a staggering 70 percent compared to December. RevolutionHealth is also down to 311K monthly uniques. That isn’t even a top 100 consumer health site.
These companies have been masters of buying keywords in order to artificially inflate their true reach. I guess with the media buying season over, they wanted to save a little cash.
John — I did get a chuckle out of the comment about Steve Case being on the comScore board. My whole issue with comScore is that seem to cherrypick their data and love to compare networks data to sites. It gives a false representation of the health vertical space.
WebMD has the largest single site. They also have the largest network. Everydayhealth is not even close. In fact, per Quantcast, everydayhealth.com is barely a top 10 health site, and it may only be a top 5 health vertical.
comScore seems to aggregate their data from some publishers but not others. It seems to be based on whether a publisher has assigned over traffic to that network. This appears to be the case with the publishers in the EverydayHealth Network but not the WebMD Health Network.
comScore only quotes traffic to webmd.com. But, the WebMD Health Network is significantly bigger than the EverydayHealth Network. Just look at the traffic for MedicineNet, eMedicineHealth, rxlist, and medscape. You will see that their network is over 40 million monthly uniques.
comScore should compare sites to sites and networks to networks. Mixing the two is just plain wrong.
Wellsphere makes certain promises in exchange for content. Wellsphere does not actually deliver. That is what annoys most bloggers.
Wellsphere promises a link from their highly ranked site that will raise your ratings. Then wellsphere pretends to give you the link but puts in soem sneaky coding that prevents google from following the link at all. The no-follow is bad enough. They also use a “link out”command that prevents google from indexing your site.
I provided original content to Wellsphere in exchange for a link. I am now going after these sleazebags for breach of contract.
Stay far away from wellsphere. I have written articles for dozens of sites in the past few months. All were happy to receive professionally written, original content in exchange for a link.
Wellsphere gets greedy. They feel if you are getting something, they must be losing something.
Again, the issue with wellsphere is that they take your content in exchange for promoting via a link. They use some sneaky SEO coding in an underhanded manner to rip you off.
Anyone who contributes to Wellsphere receives nothing in return.