Tongues are wagging across the valley about Steve Case's Revolution Health being up for sale. Is this true? Or is Revolution just in a bit more trouble (after all the rumors of folks being unhappy and leaving, no health insurance for quite a while, etc. etc.).
Either way, their traffic is dropping precipitously - see the graph below, from Quantcast.
This is quite the drop-off. However, it could also be a function of Revolution slowing down their SEM efforts - they grew their traffic aggressively using SEM (and who doesn't today?), but early estimates held that the Revolution gurus were spending between $400K - $800k/month between October 2007 to May 2008, without getting a proportionate return. If that was the case, then it makes sense that they ramp down their SEM activities until they can run them profitably, or at break-even.... or even at a loss that is sustainable, given their overall burn-rate.
There is, of course, another option - that Google changed their algos with respect to Revolution Health, temporarily destroying their SEM strategies. It happens quite often, much to the detriment of Google advertisers.
(Its not just SEM players who get taken to task every now and then; SEO companies also get whacked when the big G changes its ranking algos - witness what happened to Answers.com last year).
By the way, on a totally separate note, the graph above shows why I love Quantcast; comScore, which is the metrics provider of choice for most advertisers and agencies (specially in the Health industry), shows a company's total network. A few months earlier, Revolution signed a deal with Daily Strength, to supply ads to DS. comScore would probably show Daily Strength Page Views and other metrics under Revolution Health.
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1 comment:
Don't trust one single source for traffic data. Check other source such as google, Alexa, etc. They don't all show Revolution Health traffic goes down. In fact some of them show the traffic going up.
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