All of this raises the question: Why are obituaries so highly regarded? The answer is simple, according to Robin Heppell, a funeral marketing consultant: Obituaries attract web traffic.
For example, Monique Heller, Whose obituary for her father, which included how he stopped “thievs from lunching with laxative chocolate chip cookies and fecal burgers”, which went viral in 2019. Local media reported on the record. For her unusual outspokenness about her father, National Public Radio contacted her and her father’s name briefly surfaced on Twitter. “I’m like a god cow, Dad, you know, you made it,” she said.
Accusations like Heller’s have a magnetic pull. In 2020, SCI’s websites attracted nearly 160 million unique visitors, up from 130 million in 2019, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Heppell, who also designs and manages websites for funeral homes, says the websites of several funeral homes in metropolitan areas attract more than a million visitors a year. At some smaller newspapers, obituaries get twice as much traffic as news sections, said John Heald, managing director at Legacy.com, a company that partners with newspapers to publish announcements dead, said on a podcast in July.
This traffic leads to cash. Leclerc said Echovita generated $5 million in revenue in 2020. The company receives commissions from the sale of flowers, candles and memorial plants, he said. Since 2018, he says he’s reinvested more than $1 million from Echovita into a new business called Funerago, which he envisions as an online marketplace for funeral services. “I want to use this technology to be an industry disruptor,” he said.
Online obituaries can appeal to investors with deep pockets. Heppell, a marketing consultant and funeral home website designer, said Providence Strategic Growth, a private equity fund, approached him in 2018 to acquire his business. When the conversation turned to the valuation of the business, he said fund representatives asked him how many obituaries had been posted on websites he managed. “The valuation of their business will be based on the obituary,” he concluded. Heppell then ended the conversation with Providence.
At the time, Providence owned Tribute Technology, which provided a suite of technology services for funeral homes, including website design and management. At the end of 2020, Providence sold Tribute Technology to two other private equity funds, Carlyle Group and Vista Equity Partners, reported to be over 1 billion dollars. Verification could not be reached for comment.
On its website, Tribute Technology says it is “changing the world one obituary”. According to Heppell, to get access to these obituaries, one of its subsidiaries offers a free website for funeral homes. Brian Waters, a funeral home director in Indiana, said his family business got the website for free from a company owned by Tribute. In return, Waters says Tribute gets a 50% commission on all flowers sold along with the funeral home’s obituary as well as a significant portion from memorial plants sold on the funeral home’s website. It then collects published obituaries in one central repository. A spokesman for Tribute declined to comment.
The rise of Tribute has put pressure on Legacy.com, a fixture in the deadly online economy for more than two decades; The site receives 1.1 billion hits a year, according to Stopher Bartol, founder and CEO of Legacy. Since 1998, Legacy.com has contracted with newspapers to have access to the obituaries they publish. In 2017, a Legacy.com vice president told Cnet that the company publishes obituaries for 75 percent of dead Americans. That same year, Legacy.com tell Slate which it partners with 1,500 newspapers and 3,500 funeral homes. Legacy said those numbers are still “generally representative” but declined to comment on specifics. Recently, the company has turned more attention to funeral homes, Heald said in the July podcast. Bartol said the company also started selling memorial trees in partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation.
