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Waterfront Media Gets $25 Million To Boost Its
Health Site
Media Post Publications
By Gavin O'Malley
September 27, 2007 PRIVATELY HELD WEB HEALTH COMPANY Waterfront Media, which has positioned its Everyday Health as a media buyer's efficient and less-cluttered alternative to WebMD, this week secured another $25 million in funding. Scale Venture Partners led the round, joined by new investor, Foundation Capital. Existing investors--including Rho Ventures, Time Warner Ventures, BEV Capital, and NeoCarta Ventures--also participated in the round. Waterfront Media also announced that Sharon Wienbar, a Managing Director with ScaleVP, joined the board. "We're confident that we have the resources and assets to become the leading health property online," said Ben Wolin, Waterfront Media's co-founder and CEO. "This new round of funding will allow us to continue our fast-paced expansion of the Everyday Health Network." Tapping its robust community of diet and fitness community members, Waterfront last summer launched EverydayHealth.com--a broad-based health site built around "condition centers" covering everything from diabetes to schizophrenia. The site also offers specialists from top medical institutions to oversee relevant centers and interact with members through blogs and online chat rooms. As a self-help programming specialist, Waterfront made its mark by creating the online extension to Arthur Agatston's best-selling diet book sensation "The South Beach Diet," and subsequently added such category leaders as "What to Expect When You're Expecting," in the pregnancy and parenting space. While Waterfront's traffic ranks it consistently within the top three, it is operating in a brutally competitive category. With grand designs for the health space, media company Gaiam just acquired two healthy living brands--Zaadz and Lime Media--along with a stake in Conscious Enlightenment. Also, digital media vets Robert Tercek and Matt Edelman are in the process of launching a self-help social networking site named PeopleJam. Steve Case's RevolutionHealth.com recently saw its traffic more than double from 239,000 visitors in January to 486,000 visitors in March, according to comScore. The category leader remains WebMD Health with an average of 17.1 million unique visitors per month, and Yahoo Health, which earlier this year saw an 83% increase in year-over-year visitors with 6.7 million.
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