eHealth: 1999 traffic totals; WRH+Co 2000 predictions
Josh Fisher
Earlier this week, Media Metrix released Internet traffic data for December. Some of the highlights for eHealth companies follow:
eHealth visitor growth was up an impressive 176% in 1999, increasing from 3.9 million visitors in January to 10.8 million in December, easily outpacing the growth of new Internet users in the U.S., which climbed approximately 20% in 1999, according to Cyber Dialogue and Jupiter Communications.
Onhealth.com and drkoop.com experienced the best visitor growth in 1999, up 878% and 747%, respectively. Onhealth.com, surpassing drkoop in November, attracted 3.2 million visitors in December and finished the year in the #1 spot. Drkoop.com's visitor growth has been flat for the past four months, leading one to believe that drkoop's expensive AOL and InfoSeek/GO partnerships are not driving significant new traffic to its site.
Medscape and Mediconsult.com are the only two companies that generated positive growth in stickiness in 1999. All the other eHealth companies saw their page views per visitor and minutes per visitor either slip downward or sit flat throughout 1999. Mediconsult.com was the only company to generate triple-digit stickiness growth in 1999, growing its pages viewed from 3.5 to 11.1 and its minutes per visitor 3.8 to 13.5.
WRH+Co 2000 predictions. We expect the overall number of U.S. healthcare Internet users to grow approximately 30% in 2000 and expect the visitor growth at the top 9 eHealth sites to grow at a 75% rate or better. This pullback in growth from the blistering pace in 1999 is a combined result of marketing budgets tightening and slowdown of new U.S. Internet users. Specifically, most affluent U.S. adults are already online and low- to- moderate-income adults are not being lured to the Internet in big numbers, according to Cyber Dialogue. Furthermore, attracting the older population, which represents a majority of the ill population, to the Internet continues to be a daunting challenge. (Does your grandma surf the net?) However, we expect many eHealth companies to forge into international markets to foster growth. This strategy is already evident with WebMD and Mediconsult.com
Stickiness will be key to monetizing traffic. We expect Mediconsult and Medscape to maintain their leader positions in the stickiness categories throughout 2000. Good stickiness, as we have mentioned previously, will be key to converting traffic into revenue. We expect the leading consumer-focused content sites, onhealth and drkoop, to concentrate on improving their sagging stickiness metrics by introducing more personalization and interactive tools, as well as other new strategies to keep visitors on their sites for longer periods.
To view the 1999 traffic totals for the top 9 eHealth content companies tracked for the full year by Media Metrix, click on the following link and scroll down:
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