Healthline.com Secures 21 Million in Funding - Where's the Beef?

I just read that website Healthline had secured 21 million in funding. I congratulate them. I'm generally pretty happy when a small company raises a substantial amount of capital and this is no exception. But, I have to ask, what has the company done to justify this valuation.

First, let's examine the site. I took a look and thought it was generally well laid out. But, it wasn't anything better than WebMD or the Mayo clinic or the plethora of other medical sites and resources on the Web. I then did a search on irritable bowel, a fairly common malady. The results that came back were relatively generic and certainly no better than what I would find via Google or WebMD. If anything, Google offers more options and choice and deeper search results. I also found the results page to be cluttered and a bit confusing to read.

I then looked them up on Alexa. The results show their traffic rank at 6,130. Not bad but not great either. I have a friend who has spent around $6,000 on his site and his traffic rank isn't much lower. Based on calculations from Statbrain, the site pulls in about 100,000 visitors per day. Once again, not bad numbers, but not huge either.

Lastly, despite their claims in the press release about traffic doubling over the last year, it's not supported in the Alexa numbers. If anything, the site's traffic has peaked and come down over the last 4-5 months.

I don't think Healthline is a bad site. I'm just not sure about the valuation placed on it with a Series B round of 21 million. Then again, what do I know?