Friday, August 29, 2008

Baby boomer sites use niche ad sales strategy

By Christopher Calnan

While the term “baby boomer” may be convenient for demographers, web-based businesses targeting them are finding them hard to pin down.

Sure, baby boomers may have discretionary income, but they’re also pressed for time and few people in that generation define themselves using that term, making them a difficult demographic to target with online advertising.

Even Waltham-based RetirementJobs.com Inc., which last week landed an agreement to provide its job search engine to the 40-million member AARP — arguably the largest online gathering of baby boomers — generates revenue through listing fees rather than conventional advertising.

RetirementJobs.com is now attracting 300,000 unique visitors a month compared with 150,000 in late 2006, CEO Timothy Driver said.

It’s a similar business model employed by another baby boomer-focused dot-com: Waltham-based Care.com Inc. The company, founded in 2007, lists providers of services such as child-care and tutoring in 100 U.S. cities. It recently reached the milestone of listing 200,000 service providers, CEO Sheila Marcelo said.

Charlestown-based Eons Inc., on the other hand, found different results with its advertising-based revenue model. Eons, which in 2006 launched an online community for baby boomers, raised $32 million in venture capital and grew to become one of the largest such websites in the nation. However, it needed to restructure last year and lay off about one-third of its staff.

Baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, are typically consumers of some the most expensive big-ticket items such as travel, automobiles and financial services. But the websites targeting them need to focus more on specific needs or interests rather than an entire generation, said Denver-based consultant Brent Green, author of “Marketing to Leading Edge Baby Boomers.” Without a more narrowly defined audience, it’s difficult to generate revenue with targeted advertising, he said.

Although RetirementJobs.com attracts baby boomer job seekers, even that demographic is too broad to target with advertising, Driver said. So the website segments its users into industries, job categories and locations through online profiles before pitching prospective jobs, he said.

“We market to people along the lines of their affinities,” Driver said, “not their age group.”

The portion of baby boomers regularly using the Internet is projected to rise from 75 percent in 2006 to 83.2 percent in 2011, according to New York-based eMarketer Inc.

Although Care.com targets the general boomer group, the website’s user base naturally segments itself by seeking particular services, Marcelo said. Such users do less surfing on the web and are more loyal than younger consumers. So the key is to provide boomers with “trustworthy options” when they’re looking online for services.

To date, Care.com claims a 60 percent match rate between users and providers, Marcelo said.