Eons.com Restructures, Shrugs Off Professional Content

Eons.com, an over 50 social networking site started by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, laid off just over a third of its staff, according to various accounts, including this one from Mass High Tech. Part of the restructuring is a tightened focus on the social network area. If you had been thinking of this as a market - and it had cooled, demanding all rights for pitiful pay - think again:

While no product lines will be cut, according to Taylor, the company will take a more user-generated and user-aggregated approach to its content, including focusing more on the feature called "BOOMing" wherein members submit interesting online articles they have discovered. That will enable the site to rely less on content that requires heavy editing.

One reason for the heavy editing, from what I saw, was that Taylor didn't want to pay going rates in the first place. That resulted in either using less able people or in more experienced writers repositioning things they had already done.

One lesson to learn from this is that the whole "Web 2.0" view of the Internet is as inherently flawed as the dot com bubble of the late 90s. Companies buy into their own hype and think that just because they do something, people will come. But more often than not they don't. So if someone tries to get you to work for too little because theirs is the next big thing, just walk away and look for real business.