The long-held axiom “timing is everything” has profound meaning for Wayne Gattinella.
The WebMD CEO says it is as good a reason as any to explain his company’s long-term survival in the ever-shifting dot-com market.
“There has always been interest in health topics, but even more today,” he says. WebMD’s average number of unique monthly users in the third quarter was 40.8 million, up 26 percent from a year earlier, the company says.
WebMD — not to mention health-related Web sites BabyCenter and About.com — all have carved important niches in a specialized market that is going gangbusters.
As of January, there were 2,070 health-information sites, reaching 0.5% of all Internet traffic. That compares with 1,047 sites, reaching 0.3% of all Internet traffic, in 2005, says Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise.
The trio of companies didn’t just survive the dot-com meltdown of the early 2000s, but are thriving in today’s Web 2.0 era. They are among the last vestiges of an earlier boom that appears to be re-emerging. Silicon Valley today is as flush with venture capital and start-ups as it was in the mid- to late-1990s.
While scores of their peers are road kill, footnotes from the halcyon days of the Internet bubble before it burst, these players have benefited from a fundamental change in the way consumers use the Web, the advent of specialized content online and a boom in advertising.
They have also flourished from takeovers by media giants that chose a hands-off management approach.
“None of them blew down the doors like MySpace, but they are survivors,” says David Card, senior analyst at JupiterResearch. “MySpace turned out to be the New New Thing, along with YouTube. But these are all respectable companies that survived the worst stage of the Internet era and have been deemed by advertisers and marketers as…