Today is the public beta launch of Boomerater, a question and answer service that caters specifically to baby boomers, which is a fancy term to describe people aged somewhere between 44 and 62.
The website is basically Yahoo Answers for baby boomers. It does exactly what you’d expect it to do; users can sign up and ask questions, exchange information, ratings and reviews with their demographic peers about shopping, housing, travel, caring for elderly parents, and browse through directories for specific forum topics (e.g. financial advice). It’s hardly enough to stand out considering the plethora of other knowledge and social networks that already exist on the web that welcome people of all ages.
Boomerater falls into the same trap as Eons, the social network for baby boomers that launched in August 2006 and has had a bumpy road so far. A year after its launch, it was forced to reduce its headcount by 50% and ultimately had to shift its strategy significantly by lowering the minimum age requirement from 50 to … 13. Last week, Eons had to cut another 24 percent of its staff. Baby boomers don’t want to hang out online with other baby boomers because it makes them feel old.
Similarly, why would they want to limit the potential pool of people who can answer their questions by age? People will gravitate to the sites with the best answers, which will be those with the most users.
You have to wonder how long it will take before Boomerater finds this out.
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First of all if they are solely targeting baby boomers then they need to have a 36pt font throughout.
http://www.ngagelive.com
Like a Giant Lead Magnet!
You can put it in the deadpool already. Poeple at that age weren’t fed with the Internet so they don’t know too much how to eat it. They prefer the old plain offline hangouts.
And, in this case, if they have questions I bet they’d prefer more to ask a fellow friend or maybe their kids than to use this service.
Just curious…what age demographic has the most people in it…what age demographic has the most money…what age demographic would benifet the most from the web?
I am not saying this site is the answer but why can’t the internet be an easy, safe place for older people to connect to the services they might need?
Older people tend to be more loyal meaning if you made them happy once they will come back unlike the gen x market which are website sluts.
The baby boomer market is where the money is. The only difficult thing is you have to do more to help that age group succeed at using your website. Harder but not impossible.
It doesn’t matter the number of the people in a specific age demographic that much…what it matter are the users from that age demographic.
So, if baby boomers are 100 million and a younger generation is 50 million but the users from the younger generation are 20 million and the users from the baby boomers generation are 15 million who do you think matter the most?
If you look in the future a service should always have fresh meat…even if this application would thrive now it will be dead in the future…because how are young now and use Facebook will stick with Facebook when they’ll become older (because they got accustomed with it along the years).
Eons I think already proved this (that focusing on baby boomers it’s a loosing proposition). Offline companies or services should focus on baby boomers, not online (with very few exceptions medical related).
You said older people tend pt be more loyal…you are right. They will remain loyal to the offline lifestyle :)…Yes, baby boomers market is big in terms of money…but NOT for online services like this above.
My 2 cents opinion…
Well I am 20 and wont remember the name of this site, and they are targeting 44 to 62 year olds. Huh !
Someone explain to them this first please….
I have a harder time remembering your name.
That’s because you are not Japanese !
First of all if they are solely targeting baby boomers then they need to have a 36pt font throughout.
LOL…sums it up DEADPOOL
Saw this yesterday on Mashable.
What’s interesting (if they can pull it off) is that our members routinely *ask* for something that can filter out younger members, so that they can feel like they are networking more closely with people their own age, as the core demo of Yahoo Answers, FunAdvice, or Wiki Answers is 13-25 year olds, with the core skewing to 13-18 (60%+).
However…here’s the rub: you’ll get people from all age groups (I’m 31) visiting the site, do you want to alienate them? We have members like me (co-founder, president, etc) who’ve had their moms sign up & love our site…so, if they *can* use something where the age range is more broad, what’s the compelling advantage of restricting yourself to a subset of the population? None that I can think of.
What these guys should be doing (as we do) is have a “friend activities” list that shows your friend’s questions & answers, then if they set their friend permissions (as you can on FunAdvice, unlike any other Q&A site) to “approve friends” you can end up with a list of people who match your criteria, be it age, gender, location, or shared interests.
Summary: that functionality of doing q&a among a peer group (which is what the goal of any niche targeted service like this really is) exists today, and we’re on track for 2.3 million visitors this month…despite being bootstrapped, with a distributed team, no central office and being the most feature rich Q&A site out there…you guys would rather cover a start up that only satisfies a subset of the real need that exists in the market.
Good luck to them, but, like eons before them, they’ll open up later to all ages, and thus lose the only unique bit of their identity…imho.
You or one of your employees must have left a shitty comment, your IP was logged, and now you are black-balled. Your target audience doesn’t overlap well with TC’s anyway.
This will be huge in 20-30 years when we’re old enough to use it! Lets just hope they can find some wise investors willing to lose money for a few decades so that someday it can be a mediocre site.
These 20-year-old retards believe that they own the world. They do not even own the clothes they wear!!! or the computer they use, the house they live in or the car/bicycle they ride on…
The ‘boomers’ actually pay for *EVERYTHING* they wear and use and then, they make fun of them. Actually calling these idiots *retards* is too generous.
Hope their parents read this comment, so can give them what they deserve: being cut-off immediately!
The ‘boomers’ are the reason that our economy is in the gutter right now. Or have you forgotten that its your shitty generation that still runs the country.
To Shaun –You are cut off!!! Go to your shitty room and beat your monkey!
I disagree! I will still use normal services which I am using today even when I am 80 years old.
And that’s what the majority of the younger people will do…
Ditto. My two sons have an attitude and behave this way. They are toast now!
I will sell their laptops and tell them to get jobs in order to afford their jeans and expensive sneakers, which will be confiscated before the end of the day.
Thank you!
You forget that baby boomers are people from 44 and up (that’s what TC says)…
How about people between 25 and 44?? (I don’t mention here people like your 20 years old son)
You can see those 25-40 years old people on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace (to some degree).
Those 20 years old will mature eventually and fall into 25-40 category…they can’t stay kids forever….
Absolutely. They won’t… And something else: when you get married and start having kids you find out (OH! the horror!) slowly that your old man was right and that, also slowly, that you are actually turning into your old man!
(OH! the horror! –again)
Why do you need Twitter if you can also write mini blogs in any of the blogging service? Why do you need to stream “what you are doing right now” in a distinct service like Twitter if you can already do it in Facebook or other social networks?
The anser is : by focusing on a narrower area, you can do much better than those that do everything.
The narrower the area, the better chance at monetization. If the site can get the users, I’m sure there will be many natural alliances and advertising dollars for Boomerater — Ameriprise is one that comes to mind. Come to think of it, if Ameriprise can focus on an age group, why can’t Boomerater?
“Baby boomers don’t want to hang out online with other baby boomers because it makes them feel old.”
LOL. Just goes to show how you “darn whippersnapper” kids know nothing about being older. As if my mom wants to hang out with a bunch of 17-year-olds who regularly beat each other down with a regular stream of “It sucks!”/”It rocks!” rants and sending each other hamburgers. Please.
The comparison here with Eons is horribly flawed, because Yahoo Answers is anything but a “community”. Besides Yahoo Answers, Boomerator smacks more of the demographically targeted search services, etc., than anything else. And none of the above have yet to prove their worth.
I agree that the comparison to Eons is pretty stupid. Eons is trying to be a social network for baby boomers whereas this site seems to be more like service than a network. They don’t even have any social networking abilities that I could see.
Boomerater better be ready to deal with the millions of spam bots that made yahoo answers all but useless.
We did a little test building a Retirement Answer section on our site and found that this audience will ask questions, but they don’t contribute back a whole lot. http://www.newretirement.com/Answers/
(Granted our Answers section could use a lot of tuning up.)
Our take is that Boomers do want retirement information… but we have found that they want it from a trusted third party resource that includes community involvement vs only from their peers.
>>>>>> OBAMA IS LOSING!!!!!!!
So what ? We will still vote for him, and he is going to win, you stupid retard Republican.
So what??? Who is the retard here… hmmm, YOU!!!
>>>>>> OBAMA IS LOSING!!!!!!!
>>>>>> OBAMA IS LOSING!!!!!!!
>>>>>> OBAMA IS LOSING!!!!!!!
Odd stuff:
64.202.189.170
Can’t find boomerator on that site.
Can’t find their staff anywhere on the site (who are these guys?)
California department of corporations has nothing (database last updated on Oct 24th, updated weekly) for their LLC.
So…either their not a california company, OR they haven’t filed in the state of california yet.
Domains by proxy (godaddy) is their point of contact for their domain…and the IP maps to Godaddy as well.
Given that we can find *nothing* on these guys, they have *no chance* of success, imho, as I’ve yet to see a company run by ghosts do anything worth noting.
I don’t see the point really.
Good point Jeremy. The site is about as antiseptic as it gets - not a single ounce of personality. I went to their contact page and nothing.
All the baby boomers I know - and I’m one - ask questions over at WikiAnswers.com. The site has a number of supervisors overseeing the quality. I just looked up the demographics of WikiAnswers http://www.quantcast.com/wiki......mographics.
I’m sixty.
I would not generalize about any other generation.
I don’t want anybody to generalize about me or my generation.
Fact: all generalizations (including this one statement) are wrong.
@Kim: good design is good design. Your snark is not needed. Many of us know about ctl-scroll.
@Mircea: many of us have embraced the web. Many have not.
@Gebadia: older people don’t need to be protected from the internet.
@Jeremy: agreed. To target Boomer - or any other generational demo just by age is foolish and doomed to fail.
@Steve: The oldest boomer is sixty. Our savings was just reduced 25-35%. So retirement for most boomers is a pipe dream.
Ditto.
Please remember that many comments on TC are made by adolescents (althouhg they may be 30 years old) that don’t have a clue, don’t care or both, posing as “experts” and aspiring to be the next Sergey Brin when all they’ve done is an irrelevant site that is always losing money…
Another boomer
(who owns two companies and does not need to work, ever again!!!)
What companies do you own?
@Going Like Sixty
I know many of you have embraced the web. But comparing with the younger generations you, who embraced the web, are not enough as numbers….
I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to the older generation in my comments. But these are just facts, unfortunately…and there’s no need for rocket science to figure this out.
It’s the same with any new technology or lifestyle…younger generation is more likely to adopt what’s new (how many of baby boomers have embraced iPhone, for example?
You said “how many of baby boomers have embraced iPhone, for example?” (Not sure whether the comment or the grammar pissed me off more ;+) )
Not iPhone for me because I already had a Blackberry which is great for my business email (and can’t wait for the BB Storm next month). I also have a GPS, an Mp3 player , a Personal Media player with Wi-Fi that I can play on my high-def setup with Blu-Ray, a PVR and a Slingbox, 2 digital cameras, 2 PC’s, and oh yeah-I even write a blog aimed at boomers that often discusses technology. And in my circle of friends, I’m not the exception when it comes to technology.
No doubt you are probably more technical than me because of your age but then I probably have more money than you because of my age. The point is, if you have a technology based business and overlook the 50+ crowd, you are missing a huge demographic. And ownership of an iPhone isn’t the only standard to measure one’s ability to embrace new technology.
@Going Like Sixty
Yup - I don’t mean to generalize - this is just what we observed on our site. Agreed on the traditional idea of “Retirement” getting much more difficult for boomers and everyone else, but the market downturn is just one part of it. The bottom line is that people are living much longer these days, so they’ll have to work longer, save more and use their resources very efficiently in order to maintain a reasonable quality of life. We started (self funded - so we know there is a lot of room for improvement) this business to try to help with that process - based on having to deal with our own parents situations. As a Gen X person with kids - I need to think about funding and insuring my kids, my parents and maybe a grandparent…in addition to trying to find ways of funding my own retirement.
Your right, I shouldn’t say just old people. We all are tired of spammers, popup ads, manipulative marketing, ads that lead to shitty websites. But can I get my mom to call you when she comes to me saying I won a million dollars?
My whole point was the baby boomer market may be a harder sell but it is still a valid market. You just can’t use the same shitty ass marketing techniques.
@Matt
What’s wrong with dreaming of being the next Brin? I bet Brin dreamed to be next Gates too…and he did it…why not others do it?
Congratulations for having two companies…it’s a good achievement and some young people are only dreaming now to have the same as you. But maybe some of them will pull it off when they’ll reach your age or faster…why not?
You had dreams also when you were young, right? I suppose you didn’t get those companies as a gift…
@Mircea & Steve:
This is what my comment is all about: you are intentionally ignoring –or not understanding my point, because your [blameless, I guess] immaturity.
It is the condescending attitude of *every* generation while young: “out with the old - we know better, screw the geezers and so on…” while using *OUR* money for everything while growing up.
One marginal comment is that most of the young entrepreneurs are gladly begging the VCs for money to start their companies or rescuing them from inevitable demise: the great majority of venture capitalists are mostly “geezers,” right? Yes, yes, there are young ones, but few and far between [I actually know a few] –So again, is *OUR MONEY*
Nothing wrong with dreaming, furthermore, it is necessary in order to elevate our goals, break barriers and innovate, providing valuable services and products that would facilitate our lives on many ways…
Stating the there are not many Internet users beyond certain age is a useless argument –You could also state that “our services are not being used by many 9 year old kids…” –So what? it would be another useless statement…
Using our minds *properly* with a valuable perspective, takes a lot of work…
@Matt
No, I am not ignoring your point and maybe my way of saying it was too direct. I think I understand that you thought I was cocky or something. I was not.
Many of us are using your money, that’s right. But many of us, who are using your money, comes up with the ideas, those innovative ideas.
Why most of the entrepreuners in this digital age are younger and not older? (exceptions apply, as usual)
And it would be the same when my generation will become old…youngers will come up with ideas which we, the older ones now, didn’t.
And we will give them money to implement those ideas (which maybe many of us won’t use)…that’s how usually the life goes…and you know already that because you have probably done the same when you were young.
Sorry again if I seem to be cocky….
Cockyness is a sign of self-confidence… based on ignorance: it implies that the person believes that he/she knows everything there is to know, meaning a very narrow view and understanding of life in general…
Of course, this attitude may come with sudden ‘wealth’ [read: venture capital]
I had and still have lots of dreams…. the wet kind.
Has anyone checked to see if baby boomers really want advice solely from other boomers? I think many may have a somewhat negative view of boomers in general, but a positive view of themselves based on the assumption that they’re different than their peers. Just a thought.
@Jon Kepler — You mean “I am the king and everyone else sucks?”
No need to discriminate. It would also apply to generation X and the one that came before them and the one coming after them…
Boomerater better find a niche based on the interest (where young and old can be together), not on the age…
Again, my 2c opinion…
My 2 cents — I would say that it is a matter of logical choice: boomers are not likely to spend much time on ‘young fashion’ ‘TMZ’ or ‘ValleyWag’ sites and X’ers wouldn’t care about sites dedicated to ‘retirement residences’ unless helping grandma…
So, what would be the point to state that “our site is dedicated” to such and such age group?
They only thing that matters here is whether it targets a viable market segment and answers a need. Basic marketing. The market segment is there and it is of high value. So, it remains a question of whether it meets a need.
My guess it they would’nt be doing this unless they have some market research to back it up.
Our research, backed by MetLife and others, is that Boomers & Beyond (late 40’s to mid-70’s) care mostly about work/life balance, where our site, coaching and training are valued.
Sounds like this site http://www.elderwisdomcircle.org/
I agree, why create a service where the answers are only for or by a certain age subset? It’s I guess if they start focusing on opinionated topics, like how much should I have invested in stocks vs. bonds, it could work… but you might as well get a larger base from which to draw answers.
I agree that generalizing people by age is not what necessarily smart, but that’s not the same as getting advice from people who are in the same age group as you. I know that my parents wouldn’t want financial, career or travel advice from a 20-year old putz’s like you all (and me for that matter). There’s something to be said for people of the same age group sharing advice — they have a similar starting point and perspective, even if they are not all the same in every way. You just have to get them to the site.
Most people in that so-called boomer age group don’t consider being a boomer as being a member of a club. That doesn’t mean they are not interested in hearing about or reading articles relevant to their age group.
At “Let Life In” we have found that although the interest is there, discussing everything in a chat room or social network on a regular basis is mostly for those who haven’t much else to do. http://www.LetlifeIn.com
i’m 53 years old,do source coding and build my own pc’s as well as create programs for large corporations…i hate to inform you moronic posters but it was the baby boomers that were here first(on the on the internet)and doubt seriously that any of you understand as much about pc’s and the internet as my personal friends do,who btw are all older than me. u 20 somethings( and younger) don’t know as much as you THINK you do but yet you claim to be spoon fed the internet…bwa’hahahahahahahaha..morons!