Consumer health site Healthline spins out, raises $95M, plans to add apps, videos

By Aditi Pai
01:53 pm
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San Francisco-based Healthline Media, a consumer health website, raised $95 million from Summit Partners as part of a spin-off from its parent company, Healthline Networks. The other part of that company, now a separate company in its own right, Talix, raised money from Healthline Networks’ shareholders: $14 million.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Talix also raised money from Summit Partners.

David Kopp, who was previously Healthline Media’s general manager, will now be Healthline’s CEO. Prior to his time at Healthline, Kopp was the senior director of ad products at Yahoo.

Healthline provides consumers with information on specific health conditions and medications via its website. The company also offers consumers more than 20 communities on Facebook that aim to help people connect with others who have similar health conditions, including depression, diabetes, menopause, COPD, and epilepsy.

“We have a very unique editorial, journalistic model,” Kopp told MobiHealthNews. “We invest a lot more in producing a single piece of content than our competitors do and we get a very predictable return on that in terms of traffic. And a lot of the times our approach to the content is if you produce a better quality piece of content in a category that has high evergreen search, you can make that model of heavier investment really pay off. That’s probably the crux of our success but also the crux of where we will make additional investment.”

A good portion of the investment will be going into the editorial content on Healthline as well as adding more video content, but Kopp also said that the company plans to launch apps, the first of which will be released this quarter. Kopp wouldn't disclose many details about the company's app strategy.

“Generally Healthline will launch apps focused on the chronic condition communities,” he said. “There’s a real need to provide specific tools and capabilities for those who have chronic conditions.”

Already, a majority of Healthline’s audience is accessing the company’s content from mobile. For baby boomers, about 30 percent of them are using Healthline on mobile, Kopp said, while maybe 40 percent are using desktop, and the rest are on tablets.

“Millennial[s], not surprisingly, [are] over 70 percent mobile usage, then 25 percent desktop and [have] very small tablet usage,” Kopp said. “I think all of that really reinforces that we are doing something differently from our competitors and that’s what is driving this success with this audience. Some of it has to do with the form factor and being a mobile responsive site.”

Kopp added that they design their content with millennials in mind and are seeing up to 50 percent of their traffic coming from this audience.

Currently, Kopp said that a majority of the company’s business model is based on advertising but after launching apps, Healthline plans to add paid, subscription components at some point.

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