The Revolution Health website is, in some ways, like many others; it calls itself “a free, comprehensive health and medical information site, specifically designed with the Family’s Chief Medical Officer – women and other caregivers – in mind.” But Revolution Health is actually doing well, thanks largely to Google and Ask.
We’ll attribute Revolution Health’s impressive traffic to those search engines, anyway – the company has several other points in its favor that have no doubt helped. One such “point” is Steve Case, who is a co-founder of AOL. (Those of you who aren’t fond of AOL should know that Case moved on several years ago.)
Revolution Health’s board of directors also lists some impressive names. According to an “About Us” section, “its members include former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Fortune 500 CEOs Jim Barksdale, Frank Raines, Carly Fiorina and Steve Wiggins; leading venture capitalists/financiers Miles Gilburne, Jeff Zients, John Delaney and David Golden.”
Yet, a big part of any website’s success is due to its traffic, and as Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott discovered, a large portion of Revolution Health’s traffic is due to search engines. “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,” she writes.
Furthermore, “While Google is the dominant search engine for Revolution Health, it received 16% of its search traffic from Ask for the four weeks ending May 26, 2007. The category as a whole received 8.8% of search visits from Ask in that period. It turns out that Ask is a good partner for health websites, since 2.69% of the visits leaving Ask went to Health Information sites for the week ending May 26, 2007, compared to 1.39% of visits leaving Google.”
Ask has been doing some questionable things lately, but that’s encouraging. From all these indications, it looks like Revolution Health is in a very good position, as well.
