Website for baby boomers cuts staff

Eons Inc., a 14-month-old website catering to aging baby boomers, has laid off two dozen employees - more than a third of the staff at its Boston headquarters - in its second cutback this year.

Chief executive Jeffrey C. Taylor, who previously founded and ran the popular Monster.com employment site, said the Eons job cuts were part of a strategic shift that will make Eons more of a social networking site relying heavily on user-generated content - a MySpace or Facebook geared to people over 50 years old - rather than a general Web portal featuring largely staff-generated content.

"One of the things we've said ever since we launched is we're going to be very careful to follow our customers," Taylor said yesterday. "And what they've clearly said is they love this idea of a spirited community for people who are loving life on the flip side of 50."

Taylor said the 24 jobs eliminated were "across the board," in a variety of categories. They included editorial employees who wrote, edited, and posted features on topics like love, money, fitness, and fun. Such postings had relatively low readership, he said, compared to "community" content that connected Eons members with interests ranging from reading to travel to gardening through their own postings.

Eons, located at the Charlestown Navy Yard, eliminated 10 jobs, including editorial jobs, in February in its first staffing retrenchment. The company, launched in July 2006, has raised two funding rounds totaling $32 million from a venture capital consortium that includes General Catalyst Partners of Cambridge and Charles River Ventures in Waltham.

"This was not a scenario where we were running out of money," Taylor said.

Instead, he said, the company will direct more resources - including some new hires - toward a smaller number of features on its website centered around social networking and community building. Fewer resources will be devoted to things like obituaries.

He also said that Eons, which initially planned to target people from 50 to 100 years old - its motto was "Let's Live to be 100 (or die trying)!" - is refocusing on its "sweet spot" of members 49 to 65, who account for more than 80 percent of the members.

Taylor said he expects about 80 percent of the content on the Eons site will be supplied by members and 20 percent by staffers. Initially, he said, about 80 percent of the content was generated by the Eons staff and 20 percent by members.

Eons has close to 550,000 registered members, and had 700,000 unique visitors to its site in August, the company said.

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.