Where are the Health 2.0 millionaires?
Trusted.MD Network CEO Dmitriy Kruglyak shines a harsh light on Health 2.0 in a letter to Modern Healthcare (Buzz surrounding Health 2.0 'way overblown'):
Just because a thousand people attended a conference to socialize, kick tires and promote their wares does not mean Health 2.0 is here to stay or that the industry is undergoing a revolution (what happened to the eponymous company?). We have seen similar manias with dot-coms and regional health information organzations and everyone knows how long they lasted and how they ended. Irrational exuberance attracts a lot of onlookers....If you type in a few high-profile Health 2.0 company URLs and do back-of-the-envelope estimation of how much money they have to make per user to pay their expenses and turn a profit it is not hard to see why Health 2.0 is unlikely to provide higher-than-marginal return on investment. The story of Revolution Health, which went from the promise of turning the industry upside down to being a footnote in just three years shows how hard it is to monetize even when you have hundreds of millions in capital and manage to acquire millions of users.
Dmitriy's about right on this, except "irrational exuberance" never translated into big payouts for anyone I know of. Ever heard of a "Web 2.0 millionaire" (or billionaire)? Didn't think so.