Wired Magazine for this winner on Jeff Taylor’s plans to launch a standalone website for memorial tributes:

Monster.com Founder Starts Social Networking Site for the Dead

That is just too good to pass up. Anyway, as Wired reports:

Tributes.com is scheduled for a soft launch in June. It aims to provide a central location to house online memorials for those who have passed on. It’s starting with $4.3 million in funding, with The Wall Street Journal as a lead investor.

Jeff is the founder of Eons.com, which had an initial focus on death notices that some found a little creepy. Tributes.com goes down the path pioneered by Legacy.com, which lets the bereaved post online memories of loved ones. Wired also notes that online tributes have taken off at sites like MySpace and Facebook.

A Charlottesville, Virginia publisher has rolled out a local bi-monthly magazine for Boomers in the region, called TheNext50. Publisher Eric Lund told a local newspaper that editorial will be locally-focused, studiously non-senior and that the target is affluent Boomers retiring to the area in growing numbers. These days, it’s great to see new ventures in print (of any kind). Speaking from my own experience launching Satisfaction Magazine in Chicago, readers will love it. But the big challenge will be convincing local advertisers to value a niche market that they will perceive as “old”….no matter how hard you work to frame it as something else. That can make it difficult to attract luxury goods, autos, fashion and high end retail pages. And many advertisers are looking for pure tonnage at the lowest cost in regional markets–not something strategically targeted. On the national level, more advertisers are getting comfortable with the affluent Boomer niche.

But here’s wishing TheNext50 all the best. It would be great to see someone finally crack the code. Initial circulatin is 15,000 and it’s distributed free around the Charlottesville area.

A Dutch organization called Route50Plus launched an ambitious new website this week, Route50plus, with a mission to “track, share and distribute” information and knowledge about the 50+ market globally. The idea here is a B2B resource for marketers focused on 50+ consumers, and we can always use more light in this area. The venture’s interesting group of partners include Plus Magazine, 50 Plus Beurs, SeniorWeb, Nederland Bureau door Tourisme & Congressen, Omroep MAX, De Telegraaf, MediaPlus, and Booming Experience.

The publisher’s description is promising:

On the home page is an agenda with upcoming international events and seminars. At the heart of the site is a digital knowledge centre with the latest news published in both Dutch and English. Content and links can be found from more than 4000 national and international sources. Topics include fifty-plus marketing, media, new products, services, and trends. “This is a website marketers around the world have been waiting for,” said Claudia Biegel, Project Manager of Route 50Plus. “Finally you can find and download the most up-to-date and relevant information about everything concerning the fifty-plus on one comprehensive website.”

Just one problem: all the navigation is in Dutch and the content is a somewhat confusing blend of Dutch and English. This will be a bit of an issue for those non-Dutch speakers out there, of which there are . . . a few.

Suggestion to the publishers: reorganize the site so that visitors can opt for an English or Dutch version.

Retirement Living TV has jumped into the booming online health information market with the launch of Our Freedom Years, a site focused on health issues related to aging. This vertical market is surging as Boomers age and turn to the web for information.

Retirement Living is owned by Erickson Retirement Communities, which also publishes the Erickson Tribune monthly newspaper that circulates in the company’s communities. A press release says Our Freedom Years will draw from all those resources.

A 2007 Harris Poll showed that 52 percent of Americans “sometimes or frequently” go online for health information, up from 29 percent in 2001. Other media companies targeting the market include Hearst Magazines, which beefed up its online health presence last year by acquiring Real Age, and Healthline.com, which last year raised $25 million in new capital to fund expansion. AOL founder Steve Case has established a major presence in online health with Revolution Health, an online brand focused on healthy lifestyles. These newer sites are getting traction despite the presence of strong, entrenched online names like WebMd, the Mayo Clinic and the National Institutes of Health.

CBS Corp. President and CEO Les Moonves blames evening news anchor Katie Couric’s rating decline on men over 55, who refuse to accept a female anchor. But he still likes older viewers overall as the lynchpin demographic in his network’s strategy. Mediaweek reports on Moonves’ comments at McGraw Hill Companies’ Media Summit in New York last week:

“In response to a question about CBS being the oldest skewing network in prime time, Moonves said the network has been able to do very well bringing in advertisers who want to reach older viewers from the Baby Boomer generation, and he took a swipe at the other Big Three Networks, who he said, believe “people past [the age of] 54 don’t count.”

“This is a system we’ve been trying to change,” he said. “We think it’s unfair. We think the Baby Boomer is still where the [spending] money is.” And in a message to those who believe that younger viewers have more disposable income to spend, he described that 18-34 demographic touted by the other networks as a “bullshit demographic.”

Moonves also noted that evening news shows still bring in 21 million viewers nightly, despite all the fragmentation going on in media.

TV Week magazine ran a special report this month foced on the growing momentum in media and advertising targeting 50+ audiences. Along with the usual flotsam about affluent boomers and their supposed obsession with 1960s sitcom reruns (e.g.  TV Land cable), the report contained these interesting nuggets:

• Retirement Living TV surfaced as the “most-wanted” network that cable systems want to add to their lineups in a recent survey. The channel was named as the top “get” for networks passing 1 million to 40 million homes by 43% of respondents.
• A senior media buyer at agency Media Contacts claims that the old bias toward the 18-34 demographic is dying off:

“The old story of all advertisers wanting to focus on the 18 to 49 demographic is fading, because the boomer audience is continuing to grow and they control a tremendous amount of spending,” said Adam Kasper, senior VP and director of digital media at Media Contacts, a division of media agency Havas. “Advertisers are lagging behind a little, but they are starting to realize there is money here.”

The report also notes growing advertiser interest in targeting Boomers and seniors via online video campaigns.