About.com launches Verywell, a standalone brand focused on health

About.com, the IAC-owned media giant, has today unveiled its first standalone brand in the form of Verywell, a site for information around health.

Verywell will launch with more than 50,000 pieces of content ranging from common medical conditions like diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis to simple health tips like how to get more sleep or advice on fitness.

About.com has spent the last couple of years under the IAC umbrella rebuilding its own technology and organization to offer helpful content on a very wide array of topics.

“What we learned in rebuilding what we were is that we don’t want to be that anymore,” said CEO Neil Vogel. “About was built during a different time in the internet, where scale translated to trust. But the internet has changed. No one wants advice on their 401k from the same people that give advice on how to bake a pie.”

Learning that, About has shifted its focus to building out verticals around its troves of topic-specific content, with Verywell being the first.

Vogel explained to TechCrunch that Verywell should take a far more human approach than competitors like WebMD and EverydayHealth, which tend to be hyper-clinical and (let’s face it) also have a tendency to spark the worst fears about our own health.

Verywell content is all created by more than 120 experts, which includes doctors, trainers, dietitians and other health professionals, with every single medical fact being reviewed and approved by board-certified physicians.

“If you look at the space, everything is very clinical,” said Vogel. “You can sometimes leave those leading tech health websites feeling like you have a brain tumor. We think this space needs a friendly, approachable, creditable source for information.”

One of the greater challenges for About.com will be SEO. The company current has pretty good juice when it comes to Google searches, and launching on a new domain with a new brand could prove difficult to migrate.

Still, About is charging forward with the plan to break up its content into verticals. Vogel wouldn’t be specific about which vertical comes next, but he did mention that About.com has promising content in both personal finance and the travel sectors.

You can check out the brand new Verywell right here.