Revolution Health

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

~ the obituary ~

revolution health only makes sense if you live in a country where health care is something you shop for. the entire product was built around comparing hospitals and arguing with insurers, and it sold itself as consumer leverage against an industry. from ankara that framing does not land at all. the argument here is with a queue rather than with a claims department, and no website was ever going to shorten the queue. i read about this company at the time the way you read about foreign politics.

steve case left aol in 2003 and started revolution llc to hold whatever came next. revolution health group was founded in july 2005 and spent its first year buying pieces, among them a question and answer site called wondir and a company that administered health savings accounts. colin powell and carly fiorina sat on the board. the pitch was that the man who had put america online could do the same thing to its doctors.

the site opened in preview in january 2007 and formally in april. it was free and ad supported, with more than a hundred and twenty five tools on it. the distinguishing feature was that ordinary people could rate their own doctors. there was a symptom checker of the kind every health site has. there was also a personal health record, which was the ambitious part, the idea that you would keep your own medical history on a website owned by a startup.

the traffic came. comscore had revolution health at 4.0 million monthly visitors in july 2007 and 11.3 million a year later, which is the fastest growth in the category and still only good enough for third. webmd had 17.3 million. everyday health, run by a brooklyn company called waterfront media, had 14.7 million. what revolution health did not have was a business. two hundred employees and a cost base built for winning, against a rumored twenty to thirty million dollars of annual revenue.

~ the case file ~

~ the merger of second and third ~

on 3 october 2008, three weeks after lehman brothers went down, revolution health announced it was merging with waterfront media. the combined company was valued at about three hundred million dollars and revolution health's share of that was around a hundred million, against the two hundred million plus that had gone into it. a merger between the second and third biggest sites in a category is arithmetic aimed at the first one, and on paper the combined audience beat webmd.

the surviving name was everyday health, not revolution health. that is the part worth noticing. case's company had the bigger investors and the more famous board, and the brooklyn ad-sales operation is the one that kept its logo. an earlier attempt to merge with glam media at a valuation over a billion dollars had already collapsed before this one, so the october deal was what was left.

~ the last three years ~

the site did not go away when the deal closed. it kept running under its own name with its own homepage for another three and a half years, which is longer than most absorbed brands get. the personal health record went first, discontinued at the end of february 2010, with users told to download their records as pdfs and print them if they wanted to keep them. an outfit that had asked strangers to store their medical history with it handed the history back as a print job.

the rest lasted until spring 2012. the internet archive has revolutionhealth.com serving a full standalone health portal on 5 april 2012, still offering a register and sign in link, still carrying member-built health pages. by 1 may the same address was a redirect to everydayhealth.com and it never came back. no announcement, no farewell page. the second most expensive consumer website of the decade ended as a line in a webserver config.

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