Eons.com

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

~ the last words ~

in 2006 i was twenty-two and finishing engineering school in ankara. eons.com was a social network for people in their fifties, marketed to the american baby boomer demographic, with a launch site that ran promotional copy about staying connected after the kids leave the house. that was not me. it was also not anyone i knew at the time. i learned about eons years later through an old techcrunch headline about jeff taylor's second startup.

taylor's first startup was monster.com. he founded the monster board in 1994 and ran it until he left in august 2005. eons was the company he started right after. the pitch was that the boomer demographic had purchasing power and was online but underserved by the early-facebook product, which was still university-flavored in 2006. eons would be the over-fifty equivalent, with photo sharing and group discussion as the social hooks. longevity calculators and obituary content under the tributes.com sub-brand filled the side categories.

the user count peaked at around 800,000 registered members by 2011. crew media, a san francisco bay area agency that targets the boomer demographic for ad clients, acquired the property in april 2011. then in june 2012 the site shut down.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

eons launched in july 2006 out of charlestown, massachusetts. the design copied the early-2000s social network shell of profile pages and friend lists, then layered in features no other social network was building. a life calculator. tribute pages for the deceased. discussion groups indexed by hometown high school. meetcha was a separate event-meetup property for older singles. boom media was an ad network for boomer-focused publishers. taylor was building a whole stack around the demographic, not just the social network.

the failure mode was the demographic itself. early facebook spread through universities by network effect. eons had to acquire each user one at a time through marketing spend, because the over-fifty target audience was not arriving in pre-formed peer cohorts. by 2010 facebook was already pulling boomers in for free, and the dedicated network had no story for why someone would join eons instead of just adding their kids on facebook.

~ what got buried with it ~

crew media's official june 2012 shutdown statement pointed at the service provider contract. negotiations with the hosting provider broke down over escalating cost demands, alternative hosting could not be sourced fast enough, and the site went off. that is the operational version. the structural version is that crew media bought a property that was already losing relevance to facebook in 2011 and could not justify the spend a year later.

tributes.com survived the eons shutdown as a separate property. meetcha.com did not. the eons.com domain was eventually picked up by an unrelated mushroom supplement brand starting around 2021. jeff taylor went on to other ventures. the boomer-targeted social network category never produced a second contender, and the closest thing today is just the older-skewing demographic on facebook itself.

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