Former AOL head man Steve Case has been actively promoting his latest venture, Revolution Health, and the website is seeing a rise in visits.
Whether Revolution Health deserves the spike in traffic is another story. We’ll talk about that in a moment.
Hitwise analyst LeeAnn Prescott cited Case’s recent turn at the podium at the just-concluded D Conference. The high-profile talk has been matched by sky-high traffic to Revolution Health.
“Revolution Health is setting out to be far more than just a health information source on the web, but it is already succeeding on that front,” Prescott wrote. “For the week ending May 26, 2007, Revolution Health was ranked #11 in the Health & Medical – Information category, and traffic increased by 113% since the week ending April 28, 2007, when it was ranked #23.”
A lot of traffic to health sites comes from search engines; Revolution Health saw 49 percent of its traffic for the week ending May 26 arrive that way. Google unsurprisingly sent the site 65 percent of search engine traffic.
Prescott was surprised to see Ask ticking along behind Google, with 16 percent of sent traffic to Revolution Health. Another 15 percent came from Yahoo Search, leaving 4 percent to come from sites like MSN/Live Search and other engines.
As to the merits of Revolution Health, a query for ‘heel pain’ told us plenty. Two of the top three results were for products from the Revolution Health Store, which partners with Drugstore.com. The fourth and fifth results appeared to be responses to a quiz on heel pain, without references to the original source questions.
Below the Revolution Health results, the site displayed additional results from Kosmix, a health site we have profiled previously. Those answers were more informative, and in the case of one answer from the American Podiatric Medical Association, much more authoritative.
As for the geotargeting in the ubiquitous Google ads alongside the Revolution Health results, it needs some work. Our search brought out one ad for a specialist in Cincinnati. A 90-minute drive to the Queen City on a bad heel is not something your humble murdok writers want to try.
We aren’t sold on Revolution Health yet. Anyone trying them out also should give Kosmix or Healthline a test as well, to get a broad picture of the information available for a given query. Naturally one’s doctor should be part of any attempts to diagnose a medical issue.
