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site aimed at super rich
Low traffic and capital pullback cited by brass
By Marty Beard
Just three months after launching Worth.com as a destination site for well-to-do web surfers, parent company Worth Interactive is abandoning the concept after it failed to generate significant interest either from users or investors.
Now a full-functioned consumer portal with free email, organizational tools and channels devoted to wealth, living and giving, Worth.com will be scaled back into a simple companion site with content from the company’s print magazine.
As part of the same reorganization, Worthinteractive.com, a site for high-end marketers, will be relaunched with a new name that will better reflect its business-to-business mission. The restructuring of both sites will be announced later this week.
The sudden change in tack had a lot to do with a widespread pull-back in the investment market that has made it difficult to secure outside capital, says Sandra Demitroff, Worth.com’s chief operating officer.
"It takes some time for the ad-driven business model to become profitable, and the private equity market in general is responding to the overall internet downturn," says Demitroff.
In its new configuration, the site will attract a similar but somewhat narrower audience of high-income and high-net-worth individuals, she says.
"We are concentrating on refined references for the high net-worth consumer. The portal content has been focused on a very broad demographic. We're shooting a little higher now, but still expect to reach the old demographic."
The downgrade for Worth.com underscores a recent study from the Magazine Publishers of America that found that costly destination sites are rarely a good investment for magazine publishers.
Despite questions from the start about the feasibility of attracting large numbers of wealthy internet users to a content site, Worth.com’s October rollout was accompanied by much fanfare. Not surprisingly, the site failed to deliver the kind of traffic it promised.
At the time of launch, the company projected that 750,000 unique visitors would hit the site each month, most of them consumers with household incomes of at least $150,000, with $500,000 in deductible assets.
In reality, about 150,000 to 200,000 people showed up at Worth.com each month, generating 500,000 page views a month.
Demitroff purports to be unfazed by the shortfall.
"There are 25 million consumers in that category," Demitroff says. "The refurbished site will meet that demographic—and higher."
She notes that the site has in the past lined up advertisers such as Oracle, J.P. Morgan, Red Envelope, Saks Fifth Avenue and Delta for ad buys that went beyond banners, encompassing fairly expensive content.
"We expect to be profitable in months instead of years. In terms of ads, we’ve done remarkably well for a content company."
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
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