WebMD Not Buying Quality Health After All

With WebMD's share price free-fall ($32 to below $20), the erstwhile online Health leader is trimming some of its upcoming investments.  Its latest is to stop its proposed acquisition of Quality Health, which I covered earlier. 

This explains why, even after 3 months of announcing the deal, WebMD had not yet integrated Quality Health's traffic into its own in comScore.  As such, Waterfront Media's Everyday Health, which now reports Kosmix's RightHealth metrics under its own (see my earlier post), has a better chance of holding on to its new #1 ranking in comScore.

WebMD and Quality Health have signed an ad deal, with WebMD's sales team representing Quality Health as well.  As part of this deal, there is still a possibility that WebMD negotiates to report QH's metrics under itself in comScore.  Thats when the race begins again.

Every Right Revolution Health

I've been writing about the consolidation in the online Health space.   My last three blog posts were:

• Revolution Health's sale to WaterFront Media, the parent company of Everyday Health
• Revolution Health's traffic
• WebMD getting into the act, and acquiring Quality Health

Everyday Health had started the whole thing off by stating that their goal was to become the number #1 online Health site.  Well, they just did that!  Everyday Health has now become the #1 Health site, per comScore  (and yes, this is still playing the traffic game). 

So how did EverydayHealth/ WaterFront Media manage to do this?  Since the dawn of time, WebMD has been the #1 Health site, with no one else coming even close.   EverydayHealth and Revolution Health, in their quest to gain on WebMD, kept acquiring other health sites, or representing them for online sales, in exchange getting their traffic assigned to themselves in comScore.  And then, of course, EverydayHealth acquired Revolution.... and they were still lower than WebMD.

Well, this week, we've just announced that RightHealth, Kosmix's flagship Health site (we were #2 in Health through most of this year, per Hitwise), is now also going to be represented for display ad sales by EverydayHealth.  RightHealth traffic is the biggest contributor to Everyday's traffic - woohoo. 

I guess the online display ads world is going to be a little different.