Waterfront Media was started in 2002 by Benjamin Wolin and Michael Keriakos, who had met when both worked for Beliefnet.com, a portal to religion sites. “Consumers were going to WebMD for information, but they were flocking to off-line experts for advice,” Wolin says. So the partners began licensing the online brand rights to popular properties like the “South Beach Diet” and “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” It handled the advertising and some administrative details for the sites and paid a percentage of revenues back to the content providers. (Wolin won’t specify how big of a percentage).

The partners soon realized that, if they aggregated the sites, they could offer advertisers a more compelling reach. So they set up Everydayhealth.com as a portfolio of sites. And they added sites that were not associated with a specific book or author—sites like drugstore.com, drugs.com, even mayoclinic.com. “Think of the sites as a collection of shows and of us as their television network,” Wolin said.

Everyday Health and Revolution Health both grew rapidly. But the budding rivalry didn’t make sense to either Case or Wolin, both of whom figured their competitive sights should be set squarely on WebMD.

So last year they merged the two companies, creating a behemoth of 90 online “health centers”—Wolin’s terminology for the Everyday Health portfolio. Wolin remains Waterfront Media’s chief executive, Keriakos remains president, and the company will stay in its original Brooklyn headquarters. Case is just a board member—but one with what Wolin calls a “significant” share of the company.

While Case is not involved in day-to-day management, he certainly is involved in strategy. He knows this business—after all, AOL helped build WebMD. “WebMD is really more of an online library of information,” Case explains. “We provide tools that engage consumers so they can more proactively manage their health.”

Indeed, Everydayhealth.com takes a true bait-and-keep approach to consumers. It draws them with information about everything from a specific disease (arthritis) to the pros and cons of various drugs for that disease (the late Vioxx and Bextra, the current Celebrex), to the role of dietary supplements and exercise and lifestyle. It keeps them coming back by offering meal planning, by hosting blogs from people who may be tackling similar health issues (not surprisingly, weight-loss blogs are particularly well represented), and by providing experts to answer specific questions.

Waterfront doesn’t have a lock on the field. Just this month a San Francisco group unveiled Keas, an online site that will provide personal health care plans for individuals suffering from specific conditions. Google and Microsoft have stakes in this one.

But Waterfront has Case. “We were doing fine before the merger, but the association with Steve really put us in the spotlight,” Wolin says.

It also gave them access to very patient money. “AOL was a radically new way of communicating, and it was a tough slog for a decade before it got any traction,” Case says. “But AOL wound up pioneering a whole new sector of the communications industry. And that’s what we are doing in health care.”