You've Got An Obit: Monster Founder Sees Future In Online Obits, Death Alerts

New York, NY (AHN) - Jeff Taylor, the founder of online job site Monster.com, is now touting his latest Internet project: online obituaries. Taylor said his newest venture, Tributes.com, is aimed at moving death notices from the newspaper to the Internet.

Unlike Legacy.com, which is owned partly by the Tribune Co. and receives fees from 650 newspapers to publish online death notices, Taylor intends to obtain obituaries directly from funeral homes and earn revenue by selling advertising, among other ways.

The new service will offer people alerts they can receive when a friend or classmate dies.

Despite recent numbers indicating just over a third of people 65 or older are online, Taylor believes Internet obituaries have an audience. When he opened baby-boomer site Eons in 2005 after leaving Monster.com, Taylor quickly found online obituaries one of the most popular features of Eons.