Just when we thought things were calming down in the world of Health 2.0, it’s kicking off. WebMD has been watching Everyday Health take over its spot as top Health site ranking in the ComScore rankings (cue angry diatribe from those who don’t believe Comscore, and explanations from those who think they understand what Comscore is up to). They’ve also presumably been watching as MedHelp.org went from nowhere to close to 10m visits a month (WebMD claims 60m users but Comscore says closer to 24M).
Yesterday came WebMD’s response—a serious upgrade of their community features. Over the past two weeks they’ve soft launched Health Exchange and have migrated their bulletin boards over to the new platform. On Health Exchange there’ll be lots of things familiar to Health 2.0 mavens—expert advice in the Forums from leading medical centers, the ability to tip, share resources, vote on opinions and much more.
The new launch is probably a bit of welcome change of pace for WebMD which spent the last couple of weeks getting spanked for a not-too-objective quiz on its site suggesting that everyone had depression and needed Cymbalta. Whether the new Exchange is really different to the previous bulletin boards, which weren’t as vibrant as those of its competitors, remains to be seen. But overall it shows that the world of Health 1.0 is changing and that the grandaddy of online health content sites is really going to be featuring user-generated content from now on.
