users who have created personal profiles. Each month it attracts about 600,000 unique visitors (not all of them registered), who spend an average of 18 minutes on the site each session and generate an average of 18 page views per session. (As a website editor and CEO, I can tell you that those are very good numbers by most standards, but maybe not when you consider how much money Eons has likely spent on editorial content, design, audience acquisition, and so on. I’m guessing it’s more than $20 million, because Taylor says he has half his $32 million in venture funding left, and he’s also taken in at least a few million more in ad revenues from the likes of Hyatt, Humana, CVS, Liberty Mutual, Verizon Wireless, and Harrah’s.)
Taylor won’t comment on Eons’ financial specifics. But he is candid about not everything working as planned. “There was very little traffic going to a lot of these circles,” he says. And that was definitely a problem. By late this summer, just a few months after closing his Series B round, it was clear Eons had to make some major changes to curtail spending and refocus the business model. “We spent the month of August analyzing all of our one-year data,” Taylor says. “We said we need to sunset some of these products, and we need to resource others.” That led to the big changes announced in September, when Eons laid off a third of its staff. Actually, Taylor acknowledges, some near-simultaneous attrition cost the company a few more employees than that, including its former CTO, Reed Sturtevant. Right now, Taylor says, there are 37 employees, down from 62.
When the layoffs went down, our sources told us that the refocusing was largely driven by Eons’ venture backers. Taylor puts it somewhat differently, saying, “I had full support from my venture capital investors.” In any event, he sees the wrenching experience as the kind of reality check many startups go through, and not a calamity. Monster, he pointed out, also started with a wide array of products—including a site called Roar for college students to sound off—and dropped them to focus on the one that hit it big, its job listings database. With Eons, “I described the initial effort as dragging a trawler net across this marketplace, with kinds of all different-sized holes in the net, to see what we would catch,” he says. “From the first second we measured and measured everything that was happening in the system…I thought it was all going to work. But I knew that the customers were going to decide.”
So, what did he learn from his customers? For starters, they were, on average, about a decade younger than the 65 to 67 years old that Taylor had originally imagined. And whereas his visitors ran 60-40 male in the early days (he thinks because most of the coverage was in the business press read mainly by men), his best users are far and away female. Women make up 56 percent of registered users, but, says Taylor, “women use the site two times more than men do.”
Another surprise was that the “light touch editorial” wasn’t attracting readers. “What’s clear to me 15 months later,” says Taylor, “is that the traditional content, in terms of 200 and 400 word stories developed by an editorial staff and experts in the space in all different categories, does not have a lot of traction.”
One thing that did work was obits—but there was a big surprise there, too. Obituaries had been a key part of Taylor’s original vision, and inside Eons they were doing pretty well. But it turned out that the traffic was mainly coming from people who weren’t Eons members. Because he believes there’s still a huge opportunity to steal the obit market away from newspapers—in much the same way Monster and Craigslist helped take job ads to the Internet—Taylor is looking for strategic partners to help carve off that business into a new site to be called Tributes.com. “We’re going through the process of raising an additional amount of money specifically for that business right now,” he says.
But the biggest surprise, by far, is what seems to be the outstanding success of the social networking aspects of Eons. Taylor says that in early focus groups, boomers were disdainful of social networking. “They said ‘Absolutely no way would we ever meet up online,'” he notes. “And today it is alive and well and kicking at the center of Eons’ success. It is now 70 percent of our traffic and page views.”
The same topics that met with apathy when professional writers addressed them had an electrifying effect when members posted their own personal stories or concerns. An article about quitting smoking got something like 20-30 page views, Taylor says. But a woman writing on her group page that “I’m thinking of smoking a cigarette and I haven’t smoked in 51 hours” received hundreds of posts from people encouraging her to hold on.
User groups hold a big part of the key to what Eons is trying to achieve. Unlike websites like Facebook and MySpace, which are built largely around networks of existing friends, Eons has grown around strangers meeting other strangers in groups with names like “50+ Singles,” “Bookoholics,” “Growing Old is Mandatory; Growing Up is Optional,” and “Hippies for Life.” Taylor says there are now some 3,000 groups, the biggest of which have more than 7,000 members. In addition to meeting online, these groups are increasingly meeting offline for activities such as “skits,” which stands for “spending the kids’ inheritance tours.” Taylor loves it. “They’re meeting up and having pajama parties, and they’re just ripping it.”
Eons was already adapting to the success of its social networking side long before the layoffs. Offerings like groups and member pages started out inside the “fun” circle, and then later got their own space—the “people” button. Just a few weeks ago, around the time of the layoffs, the company launched a new circle called “LifePath” that is geared to bringing people together based on their core experiences and goals for the future, as set out in their personal pages.
Eons users will see more changes in the next few months, with a more formal debut of the made-over site coming around mid-January. Taylor won’t relate exactly what’s in store—he probably doesn’t know it all yet anyway—but he says the site will offer a lot more community features.
As he contemplates what lies ahead, Taylor professes acute awareness of the many challenges Eons faces. He admits that some of his advertisers have lost patience and departed. There’s also a crop of competitors to worry about, “over 10 now,” he says, while professing not to remember their names (A quick look around the web turned up Second50years and BoomerGirl, but Taylor wouldn’t confirm whether these were ones to which he was referring).
But through all the confusion, the Eons founder says he’s convinced the company is well-positioned for success. Eons has a core of dedicated users, and given the wild popularity of sites like Facebook and MySpace for the younger crowd, he foresees a great opportunity for social networking to take off in the older set Eons serves.
Towards the end of our conversation, Taylor couldn’t help but bring up Manny Ramirez and the Boston Red Sox (the World Series was starting that night). When the Sox were down 3-1 to Cleveland in the playoffs and facing elimination, Manny caused an uproar when he said: “It doesn’t happen, so who cares? There’s always next year. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.” Manny was much-maligned for this comment, as many questioned his commitment to winning. But Taylor’s take is that Ramirez is a fierce competitor who knows that all you can do is fight the good fight, and it really isn’t the end of the world if you fail. The rest of Manny’s quote, by the way: “Why should we panic? We’ve got a great team.”
And that’s how Taylor feels. He thinks Eons is on the cusp of something special. “If we hit a single in this space, it will be very interesting,” he says. “And to stay with the baseball analogy, a home run in this space is way bigger than Monster.”
And look what happened to the Sox.
