Revolution Health's Quixotic Attempt to Get Bigger Via Merger

Last month, reports started to circulate that Steve Case's flagship health venture, Revolution Health, was on the block, and now those rumors are starting to take on some heft. Last week, the Washington Post reported that Revolution Health Network, the best-known part of the company, is close to merging with Everyday Health, a health-and-wellness site run by New York's Waterfront Media.

Should this deal materialize -- and it's important to emphasize that no one has confirmed it on the record -- the motivation seems both obvious and eminently shallow: Bragging rights. As the WaPo notes, "If the merger goes through, the combined company would be likely to eclipse the online traffic at WebMD, which has led the category for years."

Of course, it's not even clear that this claim is true. On a site basis alone, RevolutionHealth.com and EverydayHealth.com together had 9.3 million unique visitors in August, according to Compete.com; WebMD dwarfed that with 15.3 million. What's more, WebMD appears to be extending its lead, since traffic at Revolution and Everyday Health has been largely stagnant over the past year, while WebMD appears to have added almost four million unique visitors during that period. (Click on the image at left for a larger and more readable version of the chart.)

Online metrics are notoriously shaky and the WaPo quotes Comscore data to the contrary -- data that apparently includes a variety of sites in both the Waterfront and Revolution Health empires. So set that aside for now. A bigger problem, at least from my jaundiced perspective, is that a Revolution Health-Everyday Health merger looks like a pairing of me-too also-rans. Now, I confess that I'm probably not part of the target audience for either site, but both pretty clearly aim to provide a lowest-common-denominator sort of health information that's little more than one step removed from what you might find on a magazine cover at a checkout line.

Consider, for instance, the three sites' take on one medical condition, Alzheimer's disease. Everyday Health's page -- currently crowded with ads for the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aricept -- is heavy on whitespace and low on actual information, with a lot of its valuable space given over to "personal stories" related to the disease instead of helpful medical background, support information and similar data. The Revolution Health page is a bit better, although not by much -- it at least avoids the human-interest frippery. (I'm not saying such stories aren't of comfort to people with the disease or their caregivers, but you'd think a health-information site would focus first on hard facts about the condition, its symptoms, treatment, support and caregiving.)

Compare those to WebMD's dense but easily-navigable Alzheimer's Center, which -- although it also displays Aricept ads -- packs a surprising amount of information and useful links into a single page. Assuming that the information quality is roughly the same across all three sites -- something I haven't had time to evaluate -- the WebMD page is the only one that can credibly claim to offer links to most everything you'd want to know about the disease.

I've previously been critical of Revolution Health's attempts to be a one-stop shop for health -- not to mention its ever-shifting strategy. Oddly enough, that seems to be something that WebMD does relatively well. I still have my doubts as to whether even WebMD can continue to hold that position in the face of the interesting innovations offered by so-called Health 2.0 startups, but for now, it doesn't look like it has much to worry about from the likes of Revolution and Everyday Health.

A minor addendum: I did learn from the WaPo that Revolution Health Network, the main online face of the Revolution Health Group, is just part of the overall company. Other arms of the Revolution octopus include Redi-Clinic, a chain of in-store health clinics currently operating in five states (Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Virginia and Georgia); Extend Health, an online health-insurance broker; BrainScope, a developer of hand-held brain scanners; and SparkPeople, a diet-and-exercise site.