Eons Lays Off 1/3 Of Staff
Right on the heels of all the prosy, rosy predictions of boomers and other older generations adopting social networking tools designed for their particular needs, we learn that Eons, a company devoted to folks ‘on the flip side of 50’, has laid of one third of its staff:
[…]
Eons’ site right now has nine major categories: people, fun, love, money, body, lifepath, obits, games, and travel. According to the company and our source, it will no longer pursue areas like obits (offering online obits was a core premise of Eons at its founding) and travel, which are time consuming and costly to keep updated with fresh content. “Obits and travel, they’re just probably going to be spun off,” the source said. “They really need more investment, more concentrated focus.”
Going forward, Eons will focus on the community-building and social-networking aspects of the site, found mainly in its people section, which among other things hosts a collection of blogs and user groups dedicated to topics like games, romance, health, and investing. While Eons as a whole has been struggling, “The community is thriving,” our source says.
Having rasied $32M in venture funding, with $22M of that in March, Eons is well capitalized. The story offered — that CEO Jeff Taylor is reducing staff as part of a refocussing of activities around social networking — is plausible, so I believe that they are going to do that. Better than whatever alternatives they have, and after all, the New York Times said building social networks that target boomers and other age groups is a good thing, right? Well, I disagreed with the Times, and I maintain that this age-group oriented approach to social networking won’t fly. Social networks aren’t targets. This isn’t only style point-and-shoot media, like rolling out a magazine in 1990. Social networking is about people’s lives, not their purchasing habits. But people seem to beleive that this will just be something like selling Folgers, or denture cream. It isn’t.
I don’t buy the ‘demographics is destiny’ arguments, even if Eons has been able to raise $32M. I believe that some people in these various age groups will adopt social networking, but it will be based around passions — like music, travel, politics, sports, and so on — that are not age-specific, and you can’t make them be. People will affiliate with others that share their passions, and artificial boundaries dreamed up by marketing research firms will fail, even if they sound meaningful to the partners of General Catalyst and Sequoia Capital. These ‘Leisureworld’ social networks will have to mutate into something more real — and without really being tied to age at all — or they will wind up in the dead pool.
