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With all this chicane the question arises: Why are obituaries so valued? According to Robin Heppell, a funeral marketing consultant, the answer is simple: obituaries attract web traffic.
Take Monique Heller, for example, his obituary for her father, which included how he thwarted “lunch thieves with laxative chocolate cake and poop meatloaf sandwiches”. Local newspapers reported about her unusually open profile of her father, National Public Radio contacted her, and her father’s name was briefly trending on Twitter. “I thought holy cow, dad, you know you did it,” she says.
Obituaries like Heller’s have a magnetic pull. In 2020, SCI’s websites drew nearly 160 million visitors, up from 130 million in 2019, according to filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some funeral home websites in metropolitan areas draw more than a million visitors annually, says Heppell, who also designs and manages websites for funeral homes. For some smaller newspapers, obituaries draws twice as much traffic as news, John Heald, a senior executive at Legacy.com, a company that works with newspapers to publish obituaries, said on a podcast in July.
This traffic leads to cash. According to Leclerc, Echovita had sales of $ 5 million in 2020. The company takes commissions on the sale of flowers, candles, and memorial trees, he says. As of 2018, he has poured more than $ 1 million from Echovita into a new company called. invested Funerago, which he envisions as an online marketplace for funeral services. “I want to use the technology to become an industry disruptor,†he says.
Online obituaries can attract investors with deep pockets. Heppell, the funeral home marketing consultant and website designer, said Providence Strategic Growth, a private equity fund, reached out to him in 2018 to acquire his business. When the conversation turned to the company’s valuation, he said fund officials asked him how many obituaries were posted on the websites he managed. “Your assessment of the company should be based on obituaries,†he concludes. Heppell later ended talks with Providence.
At the time, Providence was owned by Tribute Technology, which provides a range of technology services for funeral homes, including website design and management. In late 2020, Providence sold Tribute Technology to two other private equity funds, Carlyle Group and Vista Equity Partners. reportedly for more than $ 1 billion. Providence could not be reached for comment.
On his website, Tribute Technology says it “changes the world one obituary at a time”. To get access to these obituaries, one of its subsidiaries is offering a free website for funeral homes, according to Heppell. Brian Waters, a funeral home in Indiana, says his family’s business got their website for free from a Tribute-owned company. In return, Waters says Tribute takes 50 percent of the commission on all flowers sold with his funeral home’s obituaries, as well as a significant portion of the money from memorial trees sold on his funeral home’s website. Then it collects the published obituaries in a central archive. A Tribute spokesman declined to comment.
The rise of Tribute has put pressure on Legacy.com, which has been a fixture in the online death economy for more than two decades; According to Stopher Bartol, founder and CEO of Legacy, the site receives 1.1 billion visits annually. Since 1998, Legacy.com has signed contracts with newspapers to gain access to the obituaries they publish. In 2017 Legacy.com became a Vice President said Cnet that the company publishes an obituary for 75 percent of Americans who die. That same year it became Legacy.com told Schiefer that it works with 1,500 newspapers and 3,500 funeral directors. Legacy says these numbers are still “broadly representative” but declines to comment on the specifics. Lately, the company has been turning its attention to funeral homes, Heald said on the July podcast. In partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation, it has also started selling memorial trees, says Bartol.
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