DrKoop.com

» see drkoop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

americans-of-a-certain-age used drkoop. i was not one of them. in 1999, when this site was at peak monthly traffic, i was sixteen in turkey on a 56k modem looking at counter-strike servers, not at health portals fronted by a former us surgeon general.

to be fair, the brand made more sense from inside the us. c. everett koop had been surgeon general from 1981 to 1989, the bowtie figure on the aids briefings, a household face for the boomer parents who would now look up symptoms online before calling a doctor. john f. zaccaro and donald hackett pitched koop on putting his name on a personal medical records website in july 1997. the company was first called personal medical records inc. it went live in july '98 and relaunched as drkoop.com in march '99.

the ipo was the 8th of june 1999, at nine dollars a share. by the close of the first week the stock was at $45.75, the company was carrying a market cap most people did not understand, and koop himself was reportedly somewhere around eighty-three years old (close enough). aol had a content-licensing deal in place. the site claimed about 1.4 million unique monthly visitors. a year and a half later it was paying its bills with bridge loans.

the company filed for chapter 7 in december 2001 after a rename to dr. koop lifecare corp, a delisting from nasdaq, and a string of failed asset-sale attempts. the domain bounced around a couple of acquirers in the years that followed. drkoop himself died in 2013 at the age of 96, outliving the company by twelve years.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the late-nineties dot-com health pitch was that consumers would research illness online and then click ads for branded pharmacy products. webmd and healtheon were swinging at the same deck. drkoop's wedge was the figurehead. you trusted koop because you had seen him on television in the eighties saying things you remembered. that face on a webpage was worth raising 88.5 million dollars at the june '99 ipo.

to be honest, the partnerships looked enormous on paper. the aol portal carried drkoop branded content. drugstore.com had a co-branded health-products tie-in. time warner had a deal too. most of those arrangements were paid placements where drkoop was the one paying for placement, with revenue projections built on traffic that never showed up at the click-through rates the deals assumed.

~ the postmortem ~

fortune magazine ran a piece in may 2000 called "dr. koop and the greed disease" that laid out the burn rate. the company was losing tens of millions of dollars per quarter. the audit committee resigned over a going-concern letter that the new auditors had filed. koop himself had cashed out around nine million dollars in shares early on. the market cap had peaked above one and a quarter billion and was now sliding into the single digits per share.

by august 2001 the site rebranded as dr. koop lifecare corp in a last attempt to find a buyer. by december the company filed for chapter 7. operations stopped. the koop name went on outliving the company through a few licensed reissues and an asset sale that ended up routing the domain at vitacost for vitamin pages (or whatever it was called).

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is that the look-up-your-symptoms use case did get built. it just got built by google search, then by webmd, then by reddit threads, then by chatgpt. the surgeon-general-as-content-strategy never came back. dr. koop the brand quietly turned into a redirect, a search result that points at vitamin pages, then at nothing.

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