Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor is furthering his goal of taking newspaper services online with Tribute.com, a website for the bereaved.
Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor helped you find a job, and helped ease you into middle age. Now he wants to help you build the last web page you’ll ever need.
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.
Taylor, who retired from Monster.com in 2005, says Monster was intended to take the jobs section of newspaper’s classified ads online. So online obituaries seemed like an inevitable next step.
In my ‘other’ job as the MD of Portal Ltd., the web and software development company, I have managed the development of the several newspaper web sites in Ireland. Perhaps the most important was the Leinster Leader Group, who our company developed an online publishing system for and the web presence. One of the features as that a visitor could book Classified Advertising via the web site and pay with the credit card.
One thing I noticed there in the reports was the obituaries. It was interesting to notice that almost all of them have been booked from oversees. What this meant is that the Leinster Leader tapped into the new market, since the only way to get the advertising in paper before was to call on the phone or walk in their offices. Neither is convenient if you are in Australia. The revenue from obituaries alone multiplied after the web site was launched. The whole new market (world – Ireland) opened.
Leinster Leader Group was sold a bit more than a year after publishing their revolutionary web sites. If I remember correctly the value was 138 mil. All the business consultants, journalists and columnists have been asking themselves what was that huge price based on…
Spot on Jeff!!!