HealthCare.com is a great business. The CEO of the company is Matias de Tezanos who I am sure many domainers already know from a while back. He has made headlines a bunch of times. Matias is one of the top young entrepreneurs / pure domain developers in the world and certainly one of the most successful latin american domainers of all time. One of the guys backing the HealthCare.com operations from the start and still heavily involved with the business is Rob Monster who just closed down one of his newer businesses, Monster Venture Partners, after burning through a little over $7,000,000 of his own personal money within two years on a bunch of website development projects. Ouch... At least he got HealthCare.com!! Right? It worked out well.. Really. So lucky. Matias also runs one of my favorite websites which I visit pretty much daily.. KillerStartUps.com ! It's awesome.
So anyways, the business is still pretty young.. The HealthCare.com website was launched from scratch a little over two and a half years ago. They acquired the domain at the end of 2006, got some financing, partnerships and money to run the biz and went hard at it. Here we are in 2009 and HealthCare.com is really a great business if you look close enough and one that stands out big time. I like it in particular because the website was developed with all of the basics plus some really cool stuff with a flavor of 2.0 but nothing over the top.
Nothing too fancy schmancy though... It would take me forever to review feature by feature and every offering they have, but you have to visit the website yourself just to see how awesome it is. The main page totally rocks. It is kind of like a parking page if you think about it.... It really is! They got tons of partnerships in place and the SEO... It is top notch. Great job from A to Z with design, functionality, marketing, management, monetization, etc.
They also recently acquired the leading health insurance PPC engine, which you probably never heard of... But of course! Because you are so comfortable with domain parking and used to it... I mean, who is looking for better paying monetization options anyways?! That is so silly...LOL. Anyways, It's called Brokers Web and they have a few hundred of the biggest advertisers in the healthcare / insurance niche signed up who bid as much as $10 or more per click on some of the most popular insurance keywords in the US' 50 states. One of the websites included in the transaction was HealthInsuranceFinders.com which has been around since 2001 and gets a ton of free SEO traffic.. TONS!! It's a great all around site and resource. It has a few thousand content pages.. But boy... They generate some very targeted and valuable traffic. *DROOLS*
Surprised?! Yup.. It's pretty sweet. They also offer syndication feeds to publishers, in other words website owners, so if you have a website.. You can get in on the action and make some serious money. They pay as much as 65% which is way more than Google and Yahoo does if you are parking your domains. With domain parking, you are always getting just a small fraction after all the middle-men take their cut and what is actually passed onto you.
So they got millions of visitors monthly.. Millions of content pages... Lots of other goodies too. But why the hell do they need 400+ mini sites and not so great ones at that. The mini-sites that consist of thin 1 pages and little content. They are basically parking pages. Well, it's definitely not for search engine marketing campaigns because most of the URL's are just too long and won't fit as the display url... It is not for SEO traffic either because they would of setup way more content on them. They have tons of it and direct access. Doh!
So, it is probably to impress potential advertisers. Something like "healthcare.com syndicates ad inventory to over 400 top health sites" sounds a lot better in your pitch compared to "your ads will be displayed on healthcare.com and our other 2 sites" right? Yep... A lot of people and companies try to pull something like this. It really gets people seriously interested because the higher the numbers of distribution... The better the results and deal must be, right?... The newspapers have been doing this forever. Regardless, they have a great thing going here and I applaud them.
Anybody who tries deserves a lot of credit... Even if they fail or even if it sucks.. When you see somebody trying to make things work --- it is great. I love seeing people hard at work. I love this type of case studies and showcases on my website. Some people have wrote in recently and expressed that this place is turning into nothing but negative bullshit.. Well, it is my "place" where I share everything and anything on my mind related to biz. The good and the bad too. If you don't like it... Don't visit. Don't read!! It is as simple as that. Nobody is forcing anything upon you. So stop the bitching and chill out, will ya.
Now, go ahead and get to work... Enough reading. I kept this post nice and short compared to the usual. So, you got that great generic category killer domain sitting in your account.. You wanna run a business just like HealthCare.com don't you? First you will need a great CEO like Matias, then you will need about $10,000,000+ in start-up capital and some other stuff too. Good luck though... This type of success doesn't happen overnight and it is A LOT of work but it is so worth it and it can happen if you are ready to make it happen. It's a long term play and a grueling process... Only the strongest will survive in this biz. The *REAL* development of a business is extremely tough. Web development is easy... Many can do this. Biz development = tough shit and it is not for everybody. Partnerships are the key. Hope you enjoyed...
Observations at WannaDevelop.com
02/23/2010: Dozens of Amazon affiliate stores for sale.. Developed by DomainMassDevelopment.com 01/11/2010: Wanna be part-owner of DomainState.com with myself and a few others? Ok, read this now... 11/02/2009: FS gets it on with WP... It's about time, no??!?! 08/24/2009: If all else fails... Who is gonna pay the bills?!! 08/22/2009: Frank Schilling has the winning formula $$$$$$
