New York — Confronted with an uncertain future and distressing ad business, AOL Health announced content partnerships with a triad of health sites that offers a resource for comprehensive health information for the entire family, the Time Warner subsidiary said Monday.
The new content partners include: Caring.com, which features articles and guidance focusing on how to care for elderly patients; HealthCare.com, provides access to its Care Provider Search, which offers a listings of more than 1.3 million medical and dental professionals across the United States, depending on location, medical specialty, and health insurance plan; and Health.com, the online channel of Time Warner Inc.’s Health magazine, which shares health-related articles, quizzes, image galleries and videos and health tips for patients.
AOL says it seeks to build a “comprehensive network” of health-related information for families, but it still ranks far below competitors in terms of users. A slump in Internet advertising is also hurting the company, and parent Time Warner is reportedly trying to sell off the AOL unit entirely.
AOL Health is backed by AOL’s digital advertising business, Platform-A, which will continue to offer significant advertising opportunities in both display advertising as well as content-targeted links on its health site. AOL Health is part of AOL Living, one of the top-two women’s sites with more than 16 million unique visitors, according to the June 2008 comScore Media Metrix.
“We are excited about AOL Health’s partnerships with these highly regarded content providers,” said Stephanie Dolgins, Senior Vice President, AOL Women’s & Lifestyle Programming. “Our goal at AOL Health is to create a comprehensive network of information that will help the entire family take care of their health needs.”
“AOL Health will share advertising revenue only with Health.com, and did not disclose why the others will not be included in the deal.”
The moves comes several weeks after AOL Body–launched a year ago– was reframed as AOL Health to reflect the retooling of the site to emphasize family health care. “We recently transformed the voice and tone and focus of the site,” said Tanya Mancini, senior editorial director at AOL Health. “We seek to broaden our reach and be able to answer questions people were asking.”
The turnaround means offering material not just on healthy living and fitness, but on topics like elder care, which many Baby Boomers are now facing when assuming care for aging parents. “People are not just looking for information about themselves,” said Mancini.
Competition in the online health category has heated up in the last year and content sharing between different health sites is not uncommon, with the launch of RevolutionHealth.com, started by AOL co-founder and former CEO Steve Case. He quickly built up the site’s content through making several acquisitions and creating new partnerships to help it expand with focused health properties such as CarePages.com, a social site for people dealing with illness or injury.
WebMD and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) remain the two most popular health sites on the Internet, with AOL Health not even in the top 10 health sites in the world. With so much ground to cover to make an impact, AOL Health will likely sign other partnerships to broaden its content in the future, but AOL officials did not disclose any future plans.
“We are positively keen to keep pace with some of the other (health) sites,” said Mancini, who added that more changes are in store for AOL Health over the next year. “We have some very ambitious plans for the site.” She declined to offer further details, however.
However, according to AOL’s release, each of the three partners will share the following content:
Caring.com: AOL Health will feature articles from across the portal including its Caregivers and Senior Health hubs. Examples of content available at: (http://www.caring.com/articles/paid-for-being-caregiver); (http://www.caring.com/articles/talk-to-elderly-parents); and
(http://www.caring.com/quizzes/should-your-parent-still-be-driving)
Health.com: AOL Health will highlight a selection of Health.com’s original articles, first-person video narratives, and feature weight-loss tips as well as condition-specific medical FAQs. AOL Health and Health.com will jointly bring health and wellness quizzes to readers both online and in its print publication, Health Magazine, which reaches more than 8 million readers.
HealthCare.com: AOL Health has launched a private-label version of HealthCare.com’s Care Provider Search. Readers will get full access to the set of data and functionality available on HealthCare.com’s leading online healthcare provider directory.
In addition, AOL Health is part of AOL’s Living network, which also includes AOL Food, AOL Home, ParentDish, and StyleList.com. comScore statistics indicate the AOL Living network recorded as many as 16 million unique visitors last month.