Beckoning Boomers to the Web

Eons and TeeBeeDee both court the over-50 crowd, but their diverging paths illustrate the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

by Sarah Lacy

In the summer of 2006 my inbox was flooded with pitches from new Web companies hoping to bring some of the MySpace (NWS) magic to the largest and most neglected demographic on the Web: baby boomers. Makes perfect sense. Boomers represent a huge market, and more than 65% of Americans between the ages of 50 and 70 use the Internet. Many would feel out of place on MySpace or Facebook, though they'd still like to connect online. And advertisers who use the online medium would certainly like to reach them.

A year later, many boomer-focused sites are discovering it's a lot harder than they thought to build a MySpace for adults. There are plenty of contenders, including Gather and BoomJ. But the duo that most interests me is last year's glitziest entrant, Eons.com, and a scrappy newcomer, TeeBeeDee, standing for both "the boomer demographic" and "to be determined," a reference to the options open to people in the postkids and retirement stage of life.

Eons and TeeBeeDee are a study in the contrasts between Webs 1.0 and 2.0 and how each generation of companies views—and tries to conquer—its respective corner of the world.

A Portal for All Things Boomer

Reminiscent of an earlier Web era, Eons has pedigree, cash, and eyeballs: Founder Jeff Taylor previously founded Monster Worldwide (MNST); Eons has raised $32 million from Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst Partners; and it gets about 600,000 unique visitors a month, according to comScore (SCOR).

Headquartered in Boston, Eons launched with fanfare, issuing press releases about its cash, early advertisers, and how Taylor—a few years shy of 50—left a cushy job to start this new venture. Reporters ate it up (BusinessWeek.com, 10/16/07). And since free press only gets you so far, Eons began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on marketing.

Taylor also did copious market research and found that virtually none of his focus group participants wanted anything to do with social networking. So Eons began as more of a portal for all things boomer, with a staff writing articles about life-changing topics boomers face. Taylor soon discovered his focus was wrong. An article on how to quit smoking would get a paltry 30 page views, while a posting from a user who hadn't smoked in 51 hours but said he was tempted to have a cigarette would get 300 comments. "It was clear people wanted to talk to each other, not get talked to," Taylor says.

Indeed, much of the early Eons approach was out of step. Credentials, lavish spending, even large audiences—all of it was paramount in the 1990s, when entrepreneurs dreamed more of huge brands than useful sites, and getting to market first was more important than getting to market right. Spending millions of dollars—including on TV commercials—to buy traffic, as Eons did, is now anathema to many who lived through the excesses of 1999 and 2000 and paid dearly when it all crashed. Better to invest in engineers who can build a product so indispensable it spreads on its own.