Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

When we last talked about Eons.com, the site launched by Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com, they were just getting started in targeting the over-50 crowd in a social networking atmosphere. Here's an update on the progress so far.

Up to this time, the site is drawing over 500,000 unique visitors a month with 125,000 registered users. This is according to Eons' own tracking. As typical with smaller sites, there is a large swing from outside traffic counters as comScore puts the uniques at 250,000 and Nielsen//NetRatings has it at 800,000 - quite a difference.

Taylor has been on TV plugging the site along with occasionally popping up on the Eon site to promote the different sections a visitor can take a look at.

"We're already ahead of plan and on our way to a couple of million unique visitors by the end of the year," said Taylor. He added that he's not trying to scale like YouTube (GOOG) or MySpace (NWS-A), but rather is looking to reach between 5 to 10 million users, "which is still fathoms larger than anything that's been put together for this age group."

The company has had no problem getting funding as they raised a second round of venture capital of $22 million, with Charles River Ventures in the lead. That doesn't include the $10 million raised from General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital last year, and who also were involved with the second round as well.

Some of the things learned so far in the venture is that advertising agencies are taking longer to get on board because they feel people in this age bracket have already made decisions on the brands they're going to use, and so are slower to roll out those types of campaigns.

As a result, it may mean that this demographic may be more valuable for direct response campaigns rather than branding efforts. It's something to keep in mind if you're targeting this same demo.

Areas that are especially important to this group, according to Neil Sequeira, a partner at General Catalyst and Eons board member, are health and fitness, travel and financial services (I'm surprised grandchildren weren't mentioned). This demo makes a lot of transactions in this areas, which should attract certain advertisers for sure.

Overall it seems that the company is taking a gradual, steady approach, something I think within this grouping is a smart thing to do. I think they will eventually get people on board, it just takes a little longer with this demographic.