Why Is WebMD So Awful?
30th August 2022
WebMD—and its imitators—are terrible. Often the first stop for health questions, WebMD bombards you with vague, unhelpful articles strewn with garish pharmaceutical ads—an ocean of “content” without substance.
And I’m not just some crank with an ax to grind—satisfaction with online health information is incredibly low, around 38%. What’s more, this satisfaction has been very stable over time—one study found that users in 2008 were just as unhappy with health information as they were in 2017!
Rightly done, a medical information site would concentrate on being up-to-date with all the latest research–a place where doctors themselves would go to find out the latest and greatest.
Do you think many doctors consult WebMD (or any of it many imitators)?
Didn’t think so.
Like much of the internet, the purpose of WebMD (and its many imitators) is not to provide a service–after all, it’s free; where’s the money in that?–but to monetize provided content. Nothing is more common than a web article about some otherwise-unimpressive-person who makes GAZILLIONS OF DOLLARS A MONTH OF PASSIVE INCOME, and when you look into it you find out that the way to wealth and fame on the internet is … monetized provided content.
Not providing a service–there’s no money in that; people expect the internet to be free, so if you charge for what you do, you’re left sitting in cyberspace whistling to yourself. This is why newspapers are so lame these days.