Second50Years Marketing Blog

We recently wrote about EONS opening up its site to people under the age of 50.

This past weekend there was an excellent article in the NYTimes about EONS and problems it is having with its website traffic. The Times article reveals that EONS traffic has taken a drastic dip–from nearly 1.2 million unique visitors in May ‘07 to only 285,000 by December of ‘07.

Jeff Taylor, founder and CEO of EONS, pointed out that in the beginning they were advertising heavily through text ads on Google and other search sites, but, although traffic was huge, they found that the Google traffic was not reliable, spending only 7 seconds on average on the site.

It is because of that decline that Taylor reworked the site to be a friendship site for the “middle-aged.”

While I agree that the traffic from Google might not have been of the highest quality, it also seems that EONS is not alone among social sites that see a flattening of traffic after the initial surge.

Beth Kanter, who writes about social media in the nonprofit context, speaks of “application fatigue,” “scaling issues,” and “downtime or latency,” at popular social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Beth refers to “Gartner’s Technology Hype Cycles” and created a chart to illustrate it.

Chart by Beth Kanter based on Gartner’s Technology Hype Cycles

Is it possible that EONS has reached the “Trough of Disillusionment?” If so it may be that EONS is simply settling into a “Plateau” that is more reasonable to sustain over time.

In this light, did Taylor need to open up the age range? Will that cure the problem of having enough traffic to keep the big advertisers?

The Boomer Consumer: The Blog, by Matt Thornhill and John Martin, says that boomers really don’t want to be age-classified in any case so it is no wonder that EONS and other sites targeted at baby boomers may not work.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below.

Update: The Eons story was picked up by “Cool News of the Day,” a blog from Reveries.com that focuses on marketing. In “Eons Ago,” the blog says:

…even those dedicated users weren’t hanging around for the stuff Jeff originally thought would attract them — “pages of information on personal finance, relationships, health and fitness,” for example.

Nor were they particularly interested in the Longevity Calculator or the Brain Games. Even the obituary section didn’t work. What snagged them, apparently, was the social networking, and the ability to create affinity groups. Thing was, these interest groups often had nothing to do with being over 50, per se. And so Jeff removed the “velvet rope” that had limited membership to the 50-plus crowd and re-positioned Eons as a “friendship engine” for “middle-aged adults.”