Monster.com founder’s new venture to die for

According to Elaine Haney, a former Eons.com executive who is now president of Tributes.com, the site is keeping a relatively low profile before its planned redesign in June and a big consumer-marketing push in September.

There’s another reason to keep a low profile until they get it right: Tributes.com faces a lot of competition. Unlike the early days of the Web, when Monster.com could make strides simply because of being online before others, today even newspapers themselves print death notices and obituaries on their own Web sites. And there are several other Web sites with a similar conceit, the best-known of which is Legacy.com, a private company started in 1998 that turned profitable in 2003, according to its spokesperson. Instead of competing directly with newspapers, however, Legacy.com has chosen to partner with and charge them a fee for hosting their online obituaries. It counts as clients more than 500 major newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Legacy.com also hosts popular guest books and allows users to write and store their own obituaries; the site boasts 11 million unique visitors per month.

Legacy.com is not concerned about Taylor’s new venture.

“Others have come and gone in this space, and we certainly take note of any new competitor, but the arrival of an online company interested in obituaries doesn’t alter our strategy in any way,” says Hayes Ferguson, Legacy.com’s chief operating officer.

Taylor says Tributes.com’s competitive edge will be its searchable central database.

“We can introduce the idea of finding information based on your contacts in the past, and you can be on the watch for people who went to your church or your school or people who you used to work with,” Taylor says.

But Taylor is patient, having learned from his experience at Monster.com how long it can take to chip away at a new market. He notes that the Conference Board recently estimated that last year the Internet helped more people find jobs than did traditional media. 

“It took 14 years from when I started Monster” to get to that point, says Taylor. “Building Tributes isn’t going to happen in one minute.”

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