Who Owns WebMD?

WebMD was born from one of the internet's first great merger waves. Jim Clark, the Netscape founder, created Healtheon in 1996 to manage healthcare transactions, and it merged with Healthscape's WebMD in 1998, keeping the WebMD name. The combined company went public on NASDAQ in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com boom.

The early 2000s brought serial expansion through acquisition, adding medical reference sites, practice management software, and the Medscape professional platform. It became the default consumer health destination as Americans turned to the internet for medical information, building a massive advertising-supported traffic base.

After years of activist pressure and strategic reviews, Internet Brands acquired WebMD Health Corp in September 2017 for $2.8 billion, taking it private and combining it with the existing Medscape business it had owned since 2013. The deal created the largest private digital health information network.

Under Internet Brands ownership WebMD has consolidated into a content-and-advertising operation, shifting emphasis toward Medscape's physician audience and specialty verticals while the consumer site defends against Google's AI answers and vertical health startups. Its workforce numbered roughly 3,000 employees at the end of 2025.