What is up with Internet Brands? The company that owns Lawyers.com, Avvo, Martindale-Hubble, and WebMD.
Internet Brands is a consumer portal monster, valued at over $12B. I have a personal interest in this company since it owns WebMD, a group I used to work for just prior to the internet bubble in 2002. Actually, I spent more time working at the precursor company CareInsite which was a company founded by Marty Wygod and his team after selling a PBM, Medco to Merck. There are lots of great stories, including how CareInsite did a Merger with Jeff Arnolds’ WebMD instead of taking the deal with IMS America (part of IQVIA) with a current market cap of $36B. Essentially, CareInsite decided to merge with a company that just lost $4.5B in its last quarter instead of hooking up with a company that just earned $320m. Yeah, I’m salty.
Fast forward to today, and I was doing some homework on my stealthy Generative AI company, Giupedi. I figured Internet Brands would be a perfect partner when we take off the stealth cloak. So as I’m checking out the website, I start seeing some idiosyncrasies. I pull up the Legal Web Page, and behold, there’s information about the health properties owned by Internet Brands. WTF
There are references to “local health professionals on the Legal page on the website. This is kinda sloppy. But, we all make mistakes … and websites can have wrong information. I’d let it slide for most companies, but when your name is literally, Internet Brands, you may wanna make sure you totally shine on “The Internet.”
Back in July 2022 Internet Brands did a recapitalization with financial heavyweights, KKR, Warburg Pincus, and Temasek. The company states that it has grown 8x since the 2014 initial investment. I decided to check out one of Internet Brands premier consumer property in Legal, Lawyers.com.
The fact that Lawyers.com is on the Internet makes me think, that 150 years of “matching people to attorneys” may be a misprint or a wild night with a webmaster and some killer weed. Maybe I’m a little picky as I get older. I should’ve known they didn’t mean Lawyers.com was around for 150 years, they were actually talking about Martindale-Hubble which is another one of Internet Brands properties and they were founded in 1868. It actually looked something like this and had nothing to do with HTML or CSS.
A couple of weeks ago, I had my PowerPoint Deck with some Canva Images sprinkled in, and I presented Giupedi.com to some potential partners. I pointed out that Lawyers.com wasn’t around for 150 years to some chuckles, and then I stated that Lawyers.com received 25m monthly viewers. That’s what it says on the Lawyers.com webpage, so its gotta be true.
Imagine my shock when I found out my PowerPoint contained misleading information. It turns out that Lawyers.com has only 1.1m unique monthly visitors as of September 2023. It also looks like people don’t wander around the website on multiple pages. They stay on basically 1 page for about 10:09 minutes, which is actually pretty impressive.
In fact, combining Lawyers.com, Avvo.com, Marindale.com, and Nolo.com doesn’t even get us to 10m legal consumers. So what’s up with this Private Equity Owned set of incredible consumer brands on the Internet? So of course I sent over a LinkedIn message to the Internet Brands CEO, because we all know that I’ll get an immediate response.
Well, no response yet, and I’m not salty about it. He used to work at McKinsey, and those folks are taking some heat these days.
All kidding aside, Bob Brisco and his team have an incredibly hard task of navigating the world of consumer vertical portals in the age of Generative AI. Back in July 2022, Internet Brands was confident of their leadership in the marketplace.
We have established clear leadership in many of our vertical markets, including Consumer Health, Consumer Legal, and Healthcare Professionals — and we have never been more excited about our strategic roadmap. Bob Brisco
Internet Brand’s portals are very focused on specific industries and I’m not sure how this type of focused Yahoo, AOL approach will work in the world of Generative AI, unless they get even stickier for the consumer. How many people are going to spend 10 minutes on a website when they can put their specific question to a ChatGPT prompt?
Edward Bukstel
CEO
Giupedi
@ebukstel
