Monster Founder Starts New Online Obituary Service
The founder of one of the first online companies to challenge traditional newspaper profits says he’s discovered yet another avenue to drain dollars.
Jeff Taylor changed recruitment advertising fourteen years ago when he started Monster.com. Now he’s looking to another newspaper stronghold as a revenue source – obituaries.
Taylor believes more and more Americans live in places far from where they were born and raised, so he hopes his new endeavor, Tributes.com, will fill a broader need for funeral notices.
Tributes.com faces more competition now than Monster did when it debuted in 1994. Local newspapers are already big players in the online obituaries business, due largely to a 10-year-old company called Legacy.com.
Legacy manages obituary sections of web sites for more than 650 newspapers, for which it charges a fee. Tribune Co. owns 45 percent of the site that gets 12 million visitors per month. Legacy offers a variety of ways for grieving family members and friends to remember loved ones. Options include virtual guest books, which can be archived online for a fee.
Taylor says his new venture will obtain death notices through partnerships with funeral homes and groups, as well as trade associations and public information about deaths from Social Security. However, he declined to give away specific details.
Tribute users will have access to sophisticated search and database technology. The website will allow users to get e-mail alerts when someone from their hometown passes away. Taylor expects to make money from selling advertising, online memorials, and gift items like flowers and cards.
Taylor described help-wanted and other forms of classifieds like auto sales as "sports of the young." He said death notices are generally of much greater interest to people in their 60s and 70s, and could be the next category of classified advertising to make a big move online,
When the tech-savvy Boomer generation hits their 60s, the older generation will be more technology savvy. A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that only 37 percent of people aged over 65 currently use the Internet, compared with 72 percent for those aged 50-64.
John Kimball, chief marketing officer of the Newspaper Association of America, said paid death notices and obituaries are a steady but hard-to-measure form of revenue for newspapers.
However, he added: "Is it somebody going after another little piece of newspaper business? Sure."
An association with Legacy has been an important way for local newspapers to draw users to their Web sites, and keep bonds with their local communities strong.
The Denver Newspaper Agency, which publishes The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, has partnered with Legacy for eight years. The classifieds director, Michelle Ackerman, said the relationship has been fruitful, noting obituaries are usually a popular search category for the newspapers’ Web sites.
Ackerman said she’d be keeping an eye on what Taylor and his colleagues do at Tributes.com. She said she would have to watch the venture in the marketplace before she could assess whether it would be a threat.
"Clearly we learned from Craigslist that you can’t just ignore these things," Ackerman said, referring to the sharp declines in classified advertising revenues at newspapers due partly to the rise of online alternatives. She also recognized funeral homes are getting into the online obituary business, like Denver-based Horan & McConaty.
Taylor, an energetic 47-year-old who DJs in his spare time, had the idea of publishing obituaries on the Internet years ago. At the time, he thought it would be an integrated part of a social Web site aimed at Baby Boomers called Eons. He started it in 2005, shortly after leaving Monster.
The Eons obituaries section was a hit with users, but didn’t have much overlap with the rest of the site. So in February he started Tributes.com as a separate company focusing on obituaries. Tributes is expected to be fully launched in September. It is operating in test mode now, and is slated for a big overhaul next week.
So far no one has succeeded in creating a national database of death notices that didn’t come from newspapers. Hayes Ferguson, the chief operating officer of Legacy.com, said that only a fraction of the 22,000 or so funeral homes in the country are part of groups. She said, "There’s an awful lot of doors to knock on."
Scott Mindrum is the CEO of a Cincinnati-based company he founded in 1995, called Making Everlasting Memories. He said getting a historically tradition bound industry like funeral homes to embrace change is quite a challenge. His company publishes online memorials and other commemorations.
Mindrum described change in the funeral industry as "glacial," but he did acknowledge that Taylor might be on the right track.Â
"I’m not saying it will never work," Mindrum said. "It’s just early."
—
On the Net: