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Alan Breznick
Seeking to establish a dominating presence on the Internet, Discovery Communications Inc. is rapidly developing and expanding online areas for science, the environment, health, travel and animals.
Discovery, known for its cable channels and programs devoted to those same subjects, is ambitiously attempting to make its Web properties as strong a force as its various TV networks. By building up these areas, company executives aim to boost their online traffic significantly, generating big hikes in advertising and electronic shopping sales.
"We hope to blow it (e-commerce) out of the water next year," said Bill Allman, VP/GM of Discovery Channel Online, which operates the company's main Discovery.com site. Citing intentions to peddle everything from books and videos to telescopes and adventure travel packages online, he added: "We have real plans to take it much farther."
Allman's shooting for the site to crack the top 50 list within a year. Media Metrix now ranks it about the 60th most popular with 1.4 million unique visitors and 23 million page views a month.
Allman, who took the helm at Discovery Channel Online last November, is counting on such traffic increases to stoke ad and electronic commerce sales on the company's main site. Although Discovery.com ranked 25th in ad revenue among all Web sites last year, he sees plenty of room for improvement, especially on the e-commerce side.
Allman is also striving to turn the main Discovery site into the predominant Web location for more of its visitors by revamping MyDiscovery, a feature that allows site users to customize their home pages in return for submitting personal information. He wants to double the number of MyDiscovery members to 1 million over the next year, creating a large database for advertisers and marketers to mine.
These online moves come as a separate but related branch of the company, Discovery Health Media Inc., develops its massive new health Web site, Discoveryhealth.com.
The $100 million site, targeted at women 25 to 54 years old and launched in July as a complement to Discovery's new health network, is bidding to become one of the Web's top health sites. John Ford, president of Discovery Health Media, said he hopes to lure between 750,000 and 1 million unique visitors a month initially.
"We want to be a leader in the category," he said. "For us, the Web site is every bit as important as the channel."
The Discoveryhealth site is vying with such leading Web health destinations as NIH.org (for the National Institutes of Health), which attracts more than 2 million unique visitors a month, and Drkoop.com, which draws about 1.5 million unique visitors. It's also competing against America Online Inc.'s popular health channel, the Mayo Clinic's site and the revamped health site that News Corp. recently launched in conjunction with its new health network.
But, even in a universe of an estimated 15,000 health-related Web sites, Ford thinks there's vast space to grow. He notes that the health category is "highly fragmented" on the Internet, with lots of smaller sites and no site really dominant.
Discoveryhealth.com aims to make its mark by featuring a greater depth and breadth of content than its Web rivals, with sections on daily health news, diseases, men's and women's health, senior citizens, kids, fitness, alternative medicine, drugs and network programming. The site also offers such "personalized" applications as free, customized e-mail.
Discovery is counting on constant promotion of the site to drive traffic. It's now using half of its promotional inventory on its four major TV networks - Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, Travel Channel and Animal Planet - to plug the new site. It's also running spot TV commercials on broadcast stations in several major markets, taking out ads in national publications and spending $750,000 on online promotion.
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