Doctor Rating Site - Need Your Advice!

What would you do with this site?

[dbdev]

I have a Canadian doctor rating website that generates a fair amount of traffic. It allows people to add their doctor and rate doctors in the database.

Membership is growing at an exponential rate. People do one of two things at the site.

1. give a bad rating (cause they are angry or whatever)
2. give a positive rating

They are there for no other reason than those two stated above.

I've tried to put up ads and affiliate programs but no one clicks on anything - ever. I have an email database - that's all.

I'd like to make money some how off this thing... it was put up on a whim (took 6 hours) after hearing of a similar us based site on the radio.

The only thing I can think of is to sell ad space to medical malpractice lawyers...

What do you think?

[edited by: physics at 9:30 pm (utc) on Jan. 10, 2008]

[physics]

I have an email database

From what I hear you can get money with those...

[adwatson]

No one accesses the site to look for good doctors in their area? That seems like the point of a site like that. How does the US-based site you heard of monetize itself?

[dbdev]

sorry... yes. many people do find the site by searching google for a doctors name...

the us based site has adsense... nothing else (from what i can see)

i've tried all kinds of affiliate programs including the love calculator, diet stuff, insurance stuff, adsense

the home page has 1500+ page views and 150 uniques per day per google analytics...

i guess some sites aren't about makin' mo' money...

whatever... onto the next one...

[Rosalind]

Aren't sites like that a lawsuit waiting to happen? I mean, are you covered for libel, or is it just a case of people leaving points out of 10?

I suspect you're right to cut your losses and move on to the next thing.

[prfb]

Hmm. Seems to me the are a couple of ways to make money off this....

1. Advertising for doctors
Lots of rating sites have "sponsored" listings that show at the top of the full listings. The responsible sites only sell those listings to providers who are reasonably well rated, and show ratings on the listing.

Of course, this only works if doctors want to advertise. Not sure how Canada's socialized medicine comes into play, maybe that makes it different from US sites.

Perhaps you could focus the site on cosmetic and other out-of-pocket surgeries?

2. Advertising for related products
Surely malpractice lawyers aren't the only related products. Especially if your site categorizes searches by medical specialty -- allergists, gerontologists, pediatrics, etc. -- you can sell specialized ad space to pharma companies, baby products, products for seniors, etc.

3. Sell search access
This probably only works if you have a pretty solid reputation, but it's effectively what Consumer Reports does, selling data on new cars.

-P

[wygk]

In my experience, affiliate programs don't work well for this type of site.

Try AdSense for a while - you'll get good ad rates for a "doctor" oriented site.

For info on legal issues, promotion, etc, consider joining the Rating and Review Professional Association (RARPA.org)

[buckworks]

150 uniques per day

That's the problem right there. You need a lot more traffic than that if you want to earn anything more than nickels and dimes.