Jeff Taylor’s Eons.com closed a second round of venture capital earlier this month, raising $22 million. And the site appears to be gaining traffic momentum, with sharp upward ticks in unique visitors and page views in February. The new investors are led by Charles River Ventures, and also include Intel Capital and Humana Inc. (the first round last year raised $10 million and included General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital).

Eons.com traffic picked up sharply in February, probably the result of the site’s…uh, unusual television advertising campaign featuring none other than Taylor himself. If you haven’t seen the ad, a long-form version is posted here on YouTube. I found it a bit creepy, but you’ve got to give Jeff credit–he’s a true believer. And the marketing is working. The only other 50+ niche site with traffic sizeable enough to talk about is AARP; Quantcast.com shows Eons’ traffic leapfrogging the mega-association unique visitor count during February. Eons tells MediaPost that it is logging about 500,00 unique visitors per month:

“We’re already ahead of plan and on our way to a couple of million unique visitors by the end of the year,” said Taylor. Eons isn’t aiming for a MySpace- or YouTube-like audience. The goal for now is a more modest 5 to 10 million users, “which is still fathoms larger than anything that’s been put together for this age group,” said Taylor.

Eons execution remains spotty. None of the articles, for example, would pass muster at most national magazines. And the site has a disturbing habit of mixing up editorial and advertising content. Still, Eons does some very important things very well. The social networking and user-generated-content components help generate buzz … and keep content costs low. More important, tools like the Eons 100 (wish list fulfillment) and the cRANKy custom search engine help Eons learn more about what’s on the minds of Boomers. That data should feed continuous improvement of the site. One interesting feature: cRANKy publishes a running list of the top search topics–a good page to check if you’re trying to keep your finger on the pulse of Boomer mindsets. Topping the list for 2006: alternative health, entertainment, finances, health/disease and “hearth and home.”

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Marketing, Media, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.