Waterfront Buying Up (Online) Properties: Waterfront Media

Benjamin Wolin and Michael Keriakos have built their success on other people's brands. Their company, Waterfront Media, is the online publisher of 24 health and self-help websites, including WhatToExpect.com, from the best-selling series of What To Expect pregnancy and parenting books; JillianMichaels. com, from trainer Jillian Michaels of NBC's "The Biggest Loser;" and SouthBeachDiet. com, from Dr. Arthur Agatston's The South Beach Diet. Waterfront Media currently has 300,000 paid subscribers and more than 4.4 million people who receive newsletters from Waterfront's sites. Perhaps Wolin and Keriakos's sweetest achievement was when Everyday Health dethroned WebMD as the No. 1 health site in the U.S.

Wolin, co-founder and CEO, and Keriakos, co-founder and president, met while working together at Beliefnet.com (now owned by News Corp.). They noticed that consumer interest in online health information was exploding and they wanted to capitalize on the trend, so they started Waterfront in 2002 in the kitchen of their former partner, Mark Tauber.

"More and more people every year were going to the Web searching for good health advice, whether that meant definitions or tools to manage their health online," says Wolin. The business model they came up with was to build a subscription-based site that offered personalized information from established experts and wrapped advertising around it.

"The founding vision was to seek out great offline advice-givers and propose a publishing model in which we ran the websites, we took all the capital risk of building those websites, and would pay a royalty back to the intellectual property owner, just like they would do with their book publishers," says Wolin. "We would approach the expert and ask them, 'You don't figure out how to get your book from the warehouse to Barnes & Noble; why should you figure out how to run your website?'"

Back in 2002, most traditional health brands or sources of health advice weren't online in a meaningful way. Brands like What To Expect When You're Expecting had a large market share in their book business — 93% of first-time moms in the U.S. who read a pregnancy book would read that book — but they didn't have a functional website. Also The South Beach Diet, the leading diet book of all time from a sales perspective, was in its Internet infancy before being approached by Waterfront.

Choosing Partners

Selecting the right brands to incorporate into the Everyday Health network is crucial to the company's success. Wolin and his team look for very specific characteristics. They try to find experts who are very influential with consumers and brands that have a great platform. For example, if a brand is publishing new books, is on television or has a radio show, Waterfront can leverage these platforms.

Wolin is also careful to partner with brands that have the potential for additional value online. Waterfront and its partners have to create a unique online consumer experience that takes advantage of the Web and not just regurgitate what's already been published in a book. In the case of the The South Beach Diet, they created a personalized meal planner to give subscribers added value that they could never get from the book. For example, if you are a vegetarian and allergic to peanuts, you can enter your dietary restrictions and the online planner will customize a meal plan that's appropriate for you.